Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Don't wait to try it. You've thought about living somewhere else. You thought about testing the job market. You thought about asking someone out. You thought about taking lessons. But what do we do? Well, like a fool, as Seneca says, we put it off. We delay starting. We say we'll do it later. We say we'll do it when we have more information, when things settle down, when we're more comfortable and secure.
There are two stoic exercises, both built around Latin expressions that can serve as mantras. The first, memento mori, right? Remember death. Life is short. You don't know how long you have. You don't know that you have later. And the second is premeditatio malurum. What's the worst case scenario? Actually think through the worst case scenario if you try this thing and you'll find that it's probably not so bad. It's not as scary as you think and you'll be able to handle whatever it is. You run through these exercises and then you stop fooling yourself. You do it. You do it with your eyes open. Maybe you don't get the job. Maybe they say no to the date. Maybe you find out you don't actually enjoy playing the piano. So what?
We learn nothing new by putting things off to another day. It's in acting that we discover whether the thing was right for us or not. Waiting teaches nothing. Hesitation teaches nothing. The only way to know is to start. And while these concepts can be uncomfortable to confront, the path to becoming a better, more resilient person isn't usually comfortable. That's what Memento Morian Pre-Meditatio Malorum is about. It's supposed to be tools that transform how you practice Stoicism every single day. I carry the...
Memento Mori coin in my pocket. Or maybe if you've ever seen me do a podcast or talk, I usually am wearing a Memento Mori ring. I'm fiddling with it. It's a reminder to stop waiting. Every time I touch it, I feel that little bit of urgency. And the premeditatio malorum idea is what gives you courage. When fear holds you back, the idea is to hold it to face the worst case scenario. You realize you can handle it and then you move forward anyway.
These medallions, which we've sold here for Daily Stoic for many years now, they take the abstract and they make it real. They turn hesitation into action, philosophy into practice. Thousands of people all over the world carry them daily, and they touch them before making big decisions, difficult moments, times when they need to remember that philosophy requires action. And that's how you move from thinking about stoicism to embodying it. You can grab both of those at store.dailystoic.com.