You Should Ask Yourself This Question When You Mess Up | 9 Stoic Keys To Building Character That Lasts

0:28Look, if you're listening to this podcast, you've probably heard of HelloFresh, right? greener with veggie-packed recipes that have two or more veggies per week, and it's tastier. You can get steak and seafood recipes delivered every week for no extra cost. They have three times the seafood options. They also have hearty fall recipes like classic beef chili or honey glazed pork tenderloin. We just got home from a week away. We're trying to think about what we're going to eat this week. It was such a relief to see that HelloFresh box sitting on our doorstep when we got home. They've got everything you need for the recipe that they pick out.

0:59There's no last minute trips to the store. Plus, the meals are delicious and easy to make. The best way to cook just got better. Go to HelloFresh.com slash stoic10fm to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life. One box with active subscription. Free meals applied as a discount on the first box. New subscribers only varies by plan. That's HelloFresh.com stoic10fm to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life. You know, you don't have to let big wireless and your overpriced phone bill suck the joy out of the holidays this year. Because right now, all of Mint Mobile's unlimited plans are 50 % off.

1:35You can get 3, 6, and 12 months of unlimited premium wireless for$15 a month. It's their best deal of the year, and it makes it really easy for you to give your expensive wireless bill the Scrooge treatment. All Mint plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text at the nation's largest 5G network. Plus, you can bring your current phone and number over to Mint. Actually, we just signed up for a Mint Mobile plan to use the social media phone here at the office. And we didn't notice any kind of change in the quality of service or network or any of that. Just a whole bunch of savings.

2:07Turn your expensive wireless present into a huge wireless savings feature by switching to Mint. Shop Mint Unlimited plans at mintmobile.com slash six. That's mintmobile.com slash six. Limited time offer upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12 months. Plans required$12 per month equivalent. Toxism fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 35 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage very easy. Mintmobile.com. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life.

2:41On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

3:00You should ask yourself this question when you mess up. Look, we all mess up. We take certain people or clients for granted and our relationship deteriorates. We get distracted and make an unnecessary mistake. We are overwhelmed by a passion or a temper and we do something bad. We're humans and it happens. What follows are consequences. as the client leaves us, the mistake costs money to repair, an apology turns out to be insufficient. And what follows consequences is often regret and sometimes shame, or for less self-aware anger and blame. We mope, we whine, we wish things were otherwise. We wish we weren't such a piece of shit, if only we had just, you know.

3:40And this sort of self-flagellation is not what stoicism is about. It's backward looking, the worst, most pointless kind of personal evaluation. Indeed, when we mess up, when we come face to face with the consequences of our actions, we must ask, what can I learn from this? Literally, we can ask that to the client who is leaving us. What can I do better next time? What warning signs did I miss? We can look at our habits and study where we got distracted and made that boneheaded mistake. We can look at the payoff we got from that passionate indulgent and examine whether it was worth the costs. And in so doing, we can learn from the past without reliving it on a loop.

4:16One way to look at Marcus Aurelius' meditations is that this is a book of calm, firm admonishments to himself after messing up. He was cruel to someone, and so the next morning he wrote about controlling his anger. He'd been wasting time recently, and so he wrote about the shortness of life. The examples are endless. He even hints at this at one of his best one-liners, when he says that we should look at every action and ask, why are they doing that? And who does Marcus say that we should start this with? With ourselves. It is inevitable that you will do wrong. You may even mess something up five minutes after listening to this email.

4:49What matters, at least to the Stokes, is not the mistakes, particularly simple errors that are a fact of life. But it's what we do about them. What matters is what lessons emerge from the missteps and how we improve because of them, how we fix or make up for them. Because that's all we can do.

5:08The most valuable asset a person can have, the Stokes would say, is character. In fact, there was an ancient expression, character is fate. Character determined your destiny. If you had bad character, you might be successful in the short term. You might win honors, but eventually that would prove to be your undoing. Your hubris and your lack of ethics would eventually lead to your demise. If you had character, you'd be all right. That wasn't saying that life would be a piece of cake that you'd get everything you wanted, but you'd be all right. So Stoicism was really about that, the cultivation of virtue, the cultivation of character, right?

5:43Marcus Aurelius said the whole point of life is to cultivate good character and do works for the common good. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode.

5:55We say, oh, I'm ruined. I've been screwed over. This broke me. I'll never be the same. No, according to Marcus Aurelius, it can only ruin your life. It can only harm you if it ruins your character. So you have to know the bankruptcy, the divorce, the scandal, none of it actually matters in the big scheme of things. It only matters if you let it affect your character. Everything else is recoverable from. You can come back from everything but that. It only ruins your life if it ruins your character.

6:28Three things I learned from the great George Raveling Hall of Fame basketball coach, civil rights activist. The first one is always be reading. He told me that his grandmother told him that the slave masters used to keep money in books because they thought the slaves would never read them. The point being, there's money in books, there's freedom in books, and there's a reason powerful people don't want you to read. Number two, he has a great question. He says, are you going to be a positive difference maker today? That's his question. Are you going to be a positive difference maker today? And that's a question I think about all the time, and I got that from him.

7:01The third one is you can learn from anyone. George Ravling once said I was his mentor in an interview, which of course is preposterous, but I'll take the point, which is that you can learn from anyone, including people who are younger than you. You can learn from anyone, even if they live very different lives than you. Even if you disagree with them about 99 % of stuff, you can learn from anyone. Anyone can be your mentor. And I learned that from George Ravling.

7:27Marcus Aurelius reminds us to meditate often on the interconnectedness of everything in the world he talks about at night when you see the stars he says imagine yourself running alongside them imagine yourself up there whenever I watch a sunset whenever I people watch whenever I look at some beautiful piece of scenery I try to think about humanity as one giant hole I try to think about all the generations that have ever lived, all the ones that will ever come. And I try to remind myself that we're all connected. We're all part of this. We're all one enormous organism. As the stoics try to remind us, what's bad for that organism is bad for us.

8:03We're all connected. We're all part of this. We all share this. And I try to never forget that.

8:12Don't sweat the small stuff. It's great advice, but also details matter. Zeno, one of the founders of stoicism said well-being is realized by small steps but it's no small thing if you don't sweat the small stuff the details that matter that add up in a big way you could lose everything you could end up very far from where you want to be so the key isn't that you don't sweat any small things but you know what are the irrelevant small things and what are the essential small things

8:45Musonius Rufus says, if you accomplish something good with hard work, the labor passes quickly, but the good remains. He says, if you do something shameful in the pursuit of pleasure, pleasure passes quickly, but the shame endures. Remember that working hard to do something good and the good lasts forever. If you do something shameful for something short term, for something pleasurable to get one over on someone else, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame, the stain remains.

9:13People suck. It's just a fact. And one of the fascinating things about Mark Ceruleus' meditations is how often he returns to this very theme. He opens the book with a catalog of the kind of people you're going to meet in the day. Frustrating people, jealous people, stupid people. It's just a fact. Even his famous passage about how the obstacle is the way, the impediment to action advances action. You know what he's talking about? He's talking about difficult people. He's not saying you write them off. He's not saying you cut them out. He's not saying you give up on humanity. He's saying that difficult people are an opportunity to be kind, to be patient, to be good, to get the most out of them.

9:46The obstacle is the way even is about this very idea. Difficult people exist and we have to put up with them and figure out a way to work with them and we have to rise to the occasion of the people that we interact with.

10:02There's this amazing story about Ulysses S. Grant. He's this promising young military officer. He serves honorably in the Mexican-American War. But then something goes wrong. He basically ends up working for his dad, selling firewood by the side of the road. And one of his old friends from West Point comes by one day and he says, good God, Grant, what are you doing? And Ulysses S. Grant just looks at him and he says, I'm solving the problem of poverty. Meaning that Grant doesn't care that he's doing a so-called menial job or that it's a humiliating occupation. All he cares about is that he's providing for his family, he's doing a good job.

10:37He knows that it doesn't say anything about him as a person. It's crazy to think that just a few years later, Grant would be the head of an enormous army and a few years after that, he'd be the president of the United States. To accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference. You don't let the lowly position change who you are and you don't let the high position change who you are either. None of it goes to your head. You know none of it says anything about you as a person and that's what really matters.

11:04One of my favorite lines in meditation, he says to accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference. Meaning that good things happen, we get awards, we succeed, we make money, awesome. But that doesn't say anything about you as a person. We fail, we fall short, we get criticized. Great, that doesn't say anything about you as a person. Another translation, it says receive without pride, let go without attachment. Sort of even keel, not being affected, not getting too high or too low, not identifying with any of it, but identifying solely with your character.

11:37In meditations, Marcus Aurelius reminds himself not to be Caesarified, not to be stained purple by the cloak of the emperor. And this is ultimately the problem that Caesar faces, right? Caesar is corrupted by what happens to him. He's corrupted by power. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Absolutely. Mark Cerellus is the one exception to that rule, of course, but Caesar doesn't escape it. Ultimately, he's killed over it, but he's changed by his endless ambition, his drive, his need to be in control, his need to get his way. And this is why Cato resists him. This is why Cato fights against him.

12:11He knew that one person shouldn't have that power. The Roman Republic was not perfect, but Cato knew that it was better than the alternative. He knew that power had to be distributed. It had to be spread out. There had to be checks and balances and that's why Cato resisted Caesar so much. When I wrote the Daily Stoic eight years ago, I had this crazy idea that I would just keep it going. The book was 366 meditations, but I'd write one more every single day and I'd give it away for free as an email. I thought maybe a few people would sign up. Couldn't have even comprehended a future in which three quarters of a million people would get this email every single day and would for almost a decade.

12:49If you want to get the email, if you want to be part of a community that is the largest group of Stoics ever assembled in human history, I'd love for you to join us. You can sign up and get the email totally for free. No spam. You can unsubscribe whenever you want at dailystoic.com slash email.

13:18my family owns a 2023 toyota forerunner and honestly it's my favorite vehicle that i've ever owned around town it's smooth and reliable but where it really shines is on our trips into the backcountry. We've taken it on backpacking adventures to Colorado and New Mexico, loaded up with gear, and never had to think twice about whether it could handle the terrain. That's what Toyota trucks are built for. Off-road confidence, rugged durability, and the freedom to explore. Toyota has a long history with the outdoor community, and they're committed to helping more people get out there and experience what nature has to offer.

13:48From remote trails to scenic byways, Toyota Trucks empowers you to take the detour, roam freely, and discover places that still feel wild and untouched. And they're not just making great trucks. They're working to expand access to adventure so more people can connect with the outdoors and pass that passion on to the next generation. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. That's toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. Shopify's point of sale system helps you sell at every stage of your business. Need a fast and secure way to take payments in person?

14:22we've got you covered how about card readers you can rely on anywhere you sell thanks have a good one yep that too want one place to manage all your online and in-person sales that's kind of our thing wherever you sell businesses that grow grow with shopify sign up for your one dollar a month trial at shopify.com slash listen shopify.com slash listen