Welcome to the Daily Snowick Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. The decades disappear like sinking ships. You swear you were just in your 20s, and now here you are looking at an invite to your 20-year reunion. You remember those early months of the pandemic like it was yesterday.
Except it wasn't just yesterday, it was six years ago. The 2020s are more than halfway done. The century is more than 25% of the way done. Your babies aren't babies anymore.
You are not young. The albums and movies you remember coming out are now celebrating anniversaries. Athletes you remember being drafted are retiring after long careers. The Roman poet Virgil said, Tempest Fugit, time flies.
Whole blocks of your life go by like that. And you barely notice as it's happening. Presidential administrations, winter Olympics, to summer Olympics, births, graduations, weddings, funerals. This is happening and it's happening in one direction.
You have to pay attention. Seneca reminds us that time will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but will glide on quietly. It will not lengthen itself for a king's command or a people's favor. Don't waste it.
Don't miss it. Don't miss your opportunity to make the most of the moments that turn into months. They turn into years. They turn into decades and disappear as soon as they pass.
I just heard this stat that shocked me, given that I hear from the sales staff and my publisher quite a bit. The status sales teams spend about 50% of their time on admin work and self selling, relationship building, closing deals. Which means they're not selling, right? And that's where today's sponsor comes in Pipe Drive.
It's a simple, intelligent CRM tool for small and medium businesses. Pipe Drive was built from the ground up to strip away that manual work that stuck its waste in your time, taking your sales team away from doing the thing you pay them to do, which is sell stuff. They've got smart automations to handle repetitive tasks and you can even customize these automations to fit your unique sales process. Plus, I've got AI features that will analyze your pipeline, flag, stall, deals, surface what needs attention, and tell your team what to do next without them having to go.
Look for it. Switch to a CRM built by salespeople, four salespeople, and join over the 100,000 companies already using Pipe Drive. And right now when you use Arlen, you'll get a 30-day free trial, no credit card or payment. You just head over to pipedrive.com slash doe to get started.
That's pipedrive.com slash doe to be up and running in minutes. Being an effective leader is difficult, right? You've got to keep your ego in check. You've got to know how your business works, how the team operates for peak effectiveness.
But most leaders are making decisions about their teams based on assumptions and not reality. And that's exactly the problem that today's sponsor scribe was built to fix. Scribe optimized passively captures how your team works across approved business apps. And it uses the AI to automatically surface workflows, inefficiencies, and improvement opportunities, no interviews, no manual discovery, no extra work for your team.
It's trusted by 80,000 plus enterprises, including nearly half of the Fortune 500. Scribe optimized follows work across every tool involved. If someone starts something that sells for some finishes and completely different tool, it tracks it the whole way. And optimize shows you where your biggest inefficiencies are, with AI-powered recommendations on how to fix them so you're not just identifying problems, you're getting clear directions on how to improve.
The kind of visibility that used to take months now is always on. And optimize only works on applications your admin improves, so no personal activity is captured and no one's privacy is at risk. If you want to see what optimize could look like for your organization, visit scribe.how slash stoic scribe.cribe.how slash stoic. If something is making you upset, write it down and look at it.
What happened? Who caused it? Now think about your reaction. What did you say?
What did you feel? Did this make it better or worse? Marcus Aurelius has already had many people and causes to be upset. You also had real power and authority.
Even so, we find that he would tell himself, you have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. So too, with what has happened to you, you did not control what happened, but you do control which impulses you will follow in the wake of it. And this is this week's meditation in the daily stoke journal titled Impulse Control.
I do hope you check out the journal. It's a little journal I do every morning. We have three quotes here that go along with it. Epictetus says, we must discover the missing art of ascent and pay special attention to the sphere of our impulses, that they are subject to reservations, to the common good, and that they are in proportion to actual worth.
Marcus Aurelius' meditation is 1137. I just love that you have Marcus Aurelius quoting Epictetus. You say good fortune used to meet you at every corner, but the fortunate person is the one who gives themselves a good fortune, and good fortunes are a well-tuned soul, good impulses, and good actions. And Marcus Aurelius' meditation is 536.
Frame your thoughts like this. You're an old person. You won't let yourself be enslaved by this any longer, no longer pulled like a puppet by every impulse, and you'll stop complaining about your present fortune or dreading the future. To me, journaling is just such a great way to do this exercise of impulse control.
I usually do it in the morning, but you could do journaling at any time. But I think, what are you upset about? Why are you angry? What are you holding on to?
What's the thing inside you really want to say to that person? I'm not saying it on the page first. Ken Frank talks about how paper is more patient than people. Sometimes I find that the thing that I was writing down, I hadn't quite worked it out yet, and if I had said it the way I was thinking on the paper, it would not go well.
Or I find that having said it once, I'm done. I don't need to mention this to anyone. It's probably better that I see it to myself. So, to me, journaling is really a way to work out some of those urges.
Just because you think something doesn't mean you need to say it. You need to develop this emotional impulse control, but that doesn't mean you just stuff it down and you don't deal with it. You've got to deal with it on the pages in the journal. That's the idea.
You let it out. It's a place to do some spiritual combat, but it's also a place for your ideas, your competing impulses, your competing opinions to battle themselves out, to fight for that limited space. So spend some time with your journalized therapy. That's what it's there for.
And if you're not taking advantage of it, chances are you are just taking those feelings out on other people or you're taking them out on yourself. And that's not a good way to go through life. So use the journal as an instrument of impulse control. It's gotten me out of trouble time and time again.
I can think of a moment when one of my books was coming out and I got sort of royally screwed over by a journalist. I haven't even say screwed over anymore. Let's just say someone did something to me that was quite unethical and quite petty and annoying. And actually the prompts in the daily still journal, it caught me.
There's like three prompts in a row. I didn't rush into saying something. I was going to wait a few days. And at the end of the three days at the end of the journaling kept it to myself.
And even now, I don't need to tell you the specifics. I've moved on and it's a may some headache, probably save me creating an enemy for no reason. And I can move on and I hope you can do the same. Hey, it's Ryan.
Thank you for listening to the daily still 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 a couple of years, we've been doing it.
It's an honor. Please spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to say anything.
I just wanted to say thank you.