Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. This is what money is jealous of. You think they have it all. You think they have the good life. You think they have everything they could possibly want. But the rich, the powerful, they're actually incredibly jealous people. They are jealous not just of other rich people and therefore often feel quite poor, according to Seneca, but they are also jealous of seemingly ordinary people. Like who? People with freedom, people with time, people who are happy. You think Marcus is realist for all his wealth and power didn't wish he could trade places with the philosophers he so admired? Of course he did. You think Seneca, at the end, having gotten so much money from Nero and thus unable to escape his clutches, didn't envy the more austere philosophers who shied away? Was his dying regret? No doubt. Gold, power, fame. As elusive and rare as these things are, time is a much more precious resource. And yet it is wasted on the young and the rich alike. But you can have those things easily. In fact, you may well have them right now. You do not need to strike it rich. You were born rich. You do not need to climb to the top. You can simply step off the treadmill. Because every opportunity comes with a trade-off and not every sum of money is worth the price. And this is one of the things we talk about in the wealthy stoic, our sort of course on stoicism and money. Maybe it sounds like from the name. It's like, here's how to make more money. No, no, it's how the stoics thought about money. It's how they thought about their finances. It's how they changed their relationship to those things. There are definitely some stoic ideas that will help you be more successful. There are also some really important stoic ideas that will change how you think about success. And it's one of the best courses I think we've done. It was controversial when it came out. But we've got some really interesting interviews in it, some really good ideas. To me, it is urgent and important. It's changed how I thought about a bunch of things in my life. And I think you'll really like it. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com. Of course, remember, if you are a daily stoic life member, you get it and all the daily stoic courses for free. So that might be a great little sort of two for one there, which is, you know, savings. I don't know. Anyways, check it out dailystokelife.com. And I'll see you in there. So generally, I get to wear whatever I want, which is usually if you see me, it's running shorts and a heavy metal t-shirt. But you know, sometimes we have a fancy guest on I want to dress up or I'm giving a talk and I've got to dress up or I'm going to be on TV and I've got to dress up. And lately I've been wearing a lot of quints. I've loved their sweaters. What I try to do is find staples, like things that I really like and I'll get multiple colors or, you know, I'll just go through that brand or that company's catalog and get a bunch of stuff I like. And I'm so glad that Quints has been a sponsor because they saved me a bunch of money, although I'll end up paying for it because now I'm hooked and I'm going to end up buying a lot of the stuff. Quints has all the wardrobe staples for spring. They've got linen shorts and shirts. They've got, as I said, sweaters, which I've been wearing all the time. Everything that Quints has is priced 50 to 80% less than what you'd find from similar brands. Quints works directly with ethical factories, cuts out the middlemen, so you're getting premium materials without the markup. Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head over to quints.com.sh. Do it for free shipping under order and 365 day returns now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com. So I stood for free shipping and 365 day returns. Maybe you've been hearing the buzz about live shopping lately. I know I have and it makes sense. Like people are already on their phones or hanging out. They're looking for stuff to do. So why wouldn't business want to meet people where they're at? If you're hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk into your store, mind a little bit about that, you're setting yourself up for disappointment. On What Not, you can go live and sell directly to people in real time. They see what you've got. They ask questions and they buy and they keep coming back. What Not is the largest dedicated live shopping platform, whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, even cookies. Sellers are building real thriving businesses on What Not. What Not buyers spend more than an hour a day on the app and they're not just browsing, bidding and buying and coming back. So you can go live, show off your projects and turn that into real income. People selling on What Not sell 10 times more than on other major marketplaces. And that's because you're not just listing products. You're building real connections with buyers. For a limited time, What Not will match your first $150 sold in the first month. You just got to visit whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. What Not dot com slash sell. The Stoic is a work in progress. Show me someone sick and happy, in danger and happy, dying and happy, exiled and happy, disgraced and happy. Show me by God how much I'd like to see a Stoic. But since you can't show me someone so perfectly formed, at least show me someone actively forming themselves so inclined in this way. Show me. That's Epictetus' Discourses. Instead of seeing philosophy as an end to which one aspires, see it as something one applies. Not occasionally, but over the course of a life, making incremental progress along the way. Sustained execution, not shapeless epiphanies. Epictetus loved to shake his students out of their smug satisfaction with their own progress. He wanted to remind them, and now you of the constant work and serious training needed every day, if we are ever to approach that perfect form. It's important for us to remember in our own journey to self-improvement that one never arrives. That the sage, the perfect Stoic who behaves perfectly in every situation, is an ideal and not an end. I'll actually give you a story about Epictetus in this very regard. Epictetus is in his house one night. He hears a noise. He walks down the hall and he sees someone is broken into his house and stealing one of his lamps that he had burning in a shrine in his house to the Roman gods. And at first he's mad, at first he's upset. And then he says, you know what? No. Actually, the problem is me. Why did I have such an expensive thing that I was worried someone would steal? And he says, tomorrow I'm going to go and get an earthenware lamp. Basically, he says, I was in the wrong. I wasn't practicing the philosophy that I preached, the idea of practicing detachment, the idea of not being materialistic. And now I need to make an improvement. And that's what he went and did. And I think there's a bunch of things to take out of that story. We don't need to get into them. But I like the idea of Epictetus telling this story, which is how we hear about it, that he knew he himself was not perfect. And that he knew that he himself had improvements and changes that he needed to make. I think this is another important way to read meditations. There's a reason that different passages hit differently, and sometimes they feel like they contradict each other. There's a reason that even at the end, the passages have Marcus Aurelius sort of near death, we think, show an evolution of a person because he's evolving and changing. But there's also in those pages some frustration with himself that he's not there yet. He says, you've been studying this your whole life. You're an old man and you're not getting any better. So I guess I tell you all that to get you to understand that it's a journey, that none of us are perfect. We don't just get it, but it's something we work at. And I'm having this unique experience, right? I wrote The Daily Stoic in 2015. It came out in 2016. That was like my 10-year point in my study of Stoics. So I've been at it for 10 years, and I'm rereading it to do these weekly episodes. And you know what I see? I see sometimes I disagree with stuff that I wrote in the book. I see ways that I would change it. I see things that I don't like. I see things that I wish I'd put in the book, different quotes that I wish I'd put in the book. Because I'm evolving as a writer, I'm evolving as a human being, and I'm evolving as a student of Stoicism, which we all should be. So it's important that we understand that Stoicism is a journey, not a destination, and that we're never going to be perfect. We're never really going to get there. But one of the things that Epic Tita says, he says, show him, you know, you basically joke him that you'll never be able to show him such a Stoic. But he does say elsewhere that just because we despair of perfecting something doesn't mean we give up trying, right? That we're still trying to do it. We're trying to get closer to it. And just because we know we can't be perfect doesn't mean we can't be better. So that's the lesson in today's entry. And just to illustrate the idea, all the things that I just told you, those stories that I just told you, those are what I wish I'd put in the original book. But I didn't because I didn't fully know them or I didn't understand them or hadn't made the connection yet. So one of the things I'm trying to get better at as a writer is taking a little bit more time, understanding that the more time I give myself, the better the finished product will be. And anyways, I feel like I'm getting better. I feel like my understanding of Stoicism has gotten better over the years. And I hope the same is true for you. Thanks everyone for listening and I will talk to you again very soon.
