Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Discipline is doing it anyway. You're tired, you're busy, looks like it's gonna rain, be easier to stay home, it's not gonna be fun, it's not a big deal. It's the perfect excuse. Plus, of course, your discipline, because that's what discipline is. It's doing it anyway. Just that you do the right thing, Marx really sprites in meditations, the rest doesn't matter. Cold or warm, tired or well rested, despised or honored. That's what makes the virtue, indeed, any virtue, but especially discipline so impressive, when the person does it anyway, does what they need to do anyway. Even when it's gonna be rough, even though it might not make a big difference, even though no one will notice. And we're all capable of this self-discipline. You just have to choose to do it. You have to decide that right now things are gonna be different and that this is the time you're gonna stop waiting for life to change and take control. I don't know how your new year has gone so far. Mine's been a little disrupted. It was a little crazy. We were sick for like the first two and a half weeks of the year. So some of my plans, some of my resolutions got thrown sideways. Maybe it went like that for you. Maybe you came back late from a trip. Maybe this was actually the craziest time of the year for you and only now are things just slowing down. But we decided as a result, I did this as much for myself as you guys did. We're gonna do another go of the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge. We did it all as a group for the first 21 days of the year but some of us fell off, some of us got interrupted, life got in the way, right? And that's why we're gonna run it again. It's not too late for you to join us in the New Year New You Challenge. You're not behind. You can still get all the stuff. It can be awesome. We've had some absolute rave reviews of it. I think you're really going to like it. I'm gonna be doing it again myself. If you wanna join us and thousands of Stoics all over the world in the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge. Well, let's do it. You can sign up right now at DailyStoic.com slash challenge. Also if you're thinking about joining Daily Stoic Life, this is a great time because you get all the challenges for free as part of being a Daily Stoic Life member. So I will see you in there. Let's join. Let's not write the year off just yet. And let's get after it. DailyStoic.com slash challenge. I'll see you in there. We've got an employee here at Daily Stoic. I won't say who because it's kind of private, but they've been using Monarch, today's sponsor, to track their progress as they try to pay off their student loan debts. I'm a college dropout, so I don't have any debt, thankfully. But I can only imagine how overwhelming would be to have this thing hanging over you. And she's been using the app to budget and save and it's bringing her a little bit closer every day to being debt free, which I can only imagine would be a huge relief. Monarch shows you exactly where your money is going. It helps you redirect it towards what matters. With automated tracking and clear projections, you can actually see yourself getting closer to being debt free or hitting your savings milestone instead of just hoping it happens. Unlike most other personal finance apps, Monarch is built to help make you proactive and not just reactive. And Monarch helped users save over $200 per month on average after joining. You can set yourself up for financial success in 2026 with Monarch. The all-in-one tool that makes proactive money management simple all year long, you can use code STELIC at Monarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year at Monarch.com code STELIC. As you know, AI is everywhere. You're probably using a handful of different AI tools in your life, you know, day to day now. But how many of us are stopping and asking, should I be asking this to AI? I think about that all the time. Do I want to give it my personal information? Do I want to upload this thing that I worked on that I own the copyright to? I don't know, right? Got work stuff, personal questions, late night thoughts, medical issues. We're sharing a lot with AI, maybe even more than we realized. And that's where DuckDuckGo comes in, because they just built Duck.ai. They're folks who want to keep their conversations with AI tools private. You go to Duck.ai and you can chat privately with the same AIs that you're already using, whether that's chat GPT or Claude or whatever. And it protects your info from hackers, from scammers and data hungry companies. It's a win-win. Plus, it's from Duck.go, the company known for protecting your data, not collecting it. No signups, no subscriptions, no learning curve. Just visit Duck.ai and start chatting. If you want to use AI without giving up your privacy, visit Duck.ai slash Stoic today. That's Duck.ai slash Stoic, a private way to chat with AI from Duck.go, where AI is always optional and private. January 26, the power of mantra. This is today's entry from the Daily Stoic book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. I'm reading from the regular hardcover, because that's what I had in front of me. You can grab a leather-bound edition that Steve and I did. I sell those at store.dailystoic.com. Our quote today is from Marcus Aurelius, his meditations, 829. Erase the false impressions from your mind by constantly saying to yourself, I have it in my soul to keep out any evil, desire, any kind of disturbance, instead seeing the true nature of things. I will give them only their due. Always remember this power that nature gave you. Anyone who has taken a yoga class or been exposed to Hindu or Buddhist thought has probably heard of the concept of mantra. In Sanskrit, it means sacred utterance, essentially a word or phrase or a thought, even a sound intended to provide clarity or spiritual guidance. A mantra can be especially helpful in the meditative process, because it allows us to block out everything else while we focus. It's fitting then that Marcus Aurelius would suggest this stoic mantra, a reminder or a watch phrase to use when we feel false impressions, distractions or the crush of everyday life upon us. It says, essentially, I have the power within me to keep this out. I can see the truth. Change the wording as you like, that part is up to you. But have a mantra and use it to find the clarity you crave. I've talked about this before, but it is funny, right? It's called meditations, but he's not doing meditation and the sense of it we think today, but then again, he also is, right? He's using mantras. What meditations is is Marcus Aurelius talking to himself. That's what it translates to in Greek. And then he is reminding himself over and over again of the same ideas. In fact, that's one of the criticisms, ironically, of meditations that Marcus Aurelius is repetitive. But that's what he's doing. He's repeating to himself what he feels needs to be repeated. This isn't what he thinks the reader needs to hear, what he thinks would be most compelling or entertaining to the reader. He's not thinking about the reader at all. He's thinking about himself. And yet what he's saying and what I was trying to say there is actually something very similar to what they talk about in meditations, that you have this power over your own thoughts. Even that idea, like I am not my thoughts. I don't have to identify this with detachment, presence, connection, breath. Some of the things that are popular in the meditation community or in meditation practices is what Marcus is doing there. And I really do feel like Stoicism is a philosophy built around a series of mantras, where that's the Stoicism that I like, that I'm attracted to. I mean, I have a couple on my arm. I have stillness as the key. He goes the enemy. The obstacle is the way. Little reminders, aphorisms. And even when I sign the books, I tend to write the same things over and over again. I'll write a more fati. I'll write one of my favorite quotes from Marcus. I think another great mantra he says, fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you. So the idea is what's your mantra? What are you repeating to yourself? What are you reminding yourself when you feel like the lower self taking over, when you feel yourself drifting, when you feel yourself going in the wrong direction? What do you repeat to yourself? What do you remind yourself? What do you need to know? And maybe it's cliche. Maybe it's lame, but I like to write these things down. I mean, as I said, I literally have been tattooed. Mark Sreelis is writing them in his journal. Like, if you were to read my journals, you'd think it's cheesy or even weird how often I'm having to say the same things over and over again. It's like, does he get it? Yeah, I get it. That's why I'm having to write it down. And I'm usually, if they were easy and natural, well, then I'm probably not pushing myself enough. So I'm trying to say these things over and over and over again. And you're hoping that it kind of becomes part of who you are, becomes part of your muscle memory, becomes second nature, so that in the big moments, it's there, right? That you just go there, right? That the training kicks in. That's what Marcus is doing. That's what I'm trying to do. That's what I hope you do. So maybe think as a big picture, what's a mantra for the year, right? For you, as we're wrapping up January here, what's your mantra? But then also, what are some day-to-day mantras, reminders, little phrases that come to you from the stillings that you can turn to always, right? Is this in my control? Is it outside my control? Serenity prayers, kind of a longer mantra. There's just so much of it. I mean, Epictetus said all the still philosophy could be reduced down to this mantra, persist and resist. There's so many of them. Pick the ones that resonate with you. Repeat them to yourself. Write them down as Epictetus says. Talk to others about them. Let them become part of you and part of the training. That's what we're doing. I'll talk to you soon. Hey, 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 these episodes in the couple 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.
