Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them. Follow in their example and to start your day off, the little dose of courage and discipline and justice in wisdom. For more visit DailyStoic.com.
These are three ancient stoic secrets. When did they carve it? Who first uttered the words? Why did they put them there?
Did Zeno see them when he visited as a young man? Did Cleanthes or Chrysippus? We don't know, but we do know that for thousands of years, three inscriptions adorned the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. The mythic heart of the ancient world that was nestled high in the slopes of Mount Parnassus at the top of a sacred way, where generations of Greeks went to get advice for their toughest problems.
The three inscriptions know thyself. Nothing in excess and surety brings ruin. What do they mean? They mean knowing your strengths, your flaws, your patterns, impulses, fears, desires, biases, and blind spots.
It means doing the right thing in the right amount in the right way. It means that pride goeth before the fall. Means always have a backup plan. If you read the Stoics with these three Delphiic maxims in mind, you will see traces and echoes of them everywhere.
Zeno said that nothing is more hostile to a firm grasp on knowledge than self-deception. Epictetus said that freedom isn't secured by filling up on your heart's desire but by removing your desire. And Seneca, the unexpected blow lands the heaviest. Indeed, the Stoics were not just intimately familiar with these maxims.
It's what they were striving for, a life of self-clarity, moderation in all things, and freedom from the traps of certainty, ego, and excess. And at the core of that pursuit, the one virtue that made the rest possible, the one thing that helps us know ourselves to find the right amount and to stay open, wisdom. So many and so great are the powers which will be found in a man, Cicero wrote, of all which wisdom is the parent and director. It's wisdom that helps us understand who we are, what's enough, and when we are and aren't being foolish.
And it's what the new book is all about. Wisdom takes work. The fourth in the Stoic virtue series, courage is calling, discipline is destiny, right now. And now wisdom takes work.
I'm so grateful to everyone who's read the earlier books. I'm grateful that you're listening to this right now and everyone who's supported daily stoic. This is the book I've been working on now. It's the culmination of six years of work.
I feel like I've become not wise in the process but certainly wiser. And I'm really excited to share it with you. One of the best things you can do to support an author is to preorder their books. It's how publishers decide how many to print.
It's how you get on the bestseller list. It's how bookstores decide how many to order. All that comes in from preordering. So I try to make it interesting.
You can even buy signed numbered for editions of all four books in a really cool, unique box set that we have. A bunch of awesome stuff like that. You can get pages from the original manuscripts that I worked on as I was writing and editing the book. You can even have dinner with me here in Bastrop, Texas and a bunch of other fellow stoics.
Lots of awesome stuff. Just go to dailystoke.com slash wisdom. Please do preorder. It comes out in October.
Really excited for you to hear and see and read the new book. It would mean a lot if you could preorder at dailystoke.com slash wisdom. Maybe you've been hearing the buzz about live shopping lately. I know I have and it makes sense.
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For a limited time, our listeners are getting 20% off their entire order at CheersHealth.com slash stoic. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I'm in the middle of recording the audiobook for the wisdom book right now.
I think I'm about halfway done. It is a painful experience doing audiobooks, I will say. It's just because it's awesome sucking on a throat coat lozenge right now. Like as a writer, you just don't talk that much, right?
It's not my job. I don't talk that much. Today I did a podcast episode with Steven Greenblatt, which was awesome. Can't wait to bring you that.
Then I had to spend a bunch of time doing the audiobook. And then now I'm getting caught up on some podcast intro. So this is quite a lot. But anyways, finishing up the audiobook, I can't wait for you to hear it, taking my time, doing it slowly, doing it right.
So it'll be a great listening experience. By the way, you can pre-order or sign at first editions of wisdom takes work. Also, if you pre-order the audiobook, you can get bonuses too. All that's at dailystowak.com slash pre-order.
But today for our Q&A, as I said, I don't do that much talking unless I'm doing talks. Back in January, I did a virtual talk for one of the world's largest staffing agencies, a company called Randstad Enterprise. And it was a sort of start of the year strategy kickoff motivational thing. They had about 1,000 employees in 15 countries.
And they asked me a bunch of questions. And I am really excited to bring that to you. And I can't wait to see some more of you in person. By the way, in September, I'm going to be doing a talk here in Austin at the Westlake Performing Arts Center.
You can grab those tickets at dailystowaklive.com as well. So if you want to ask me some questions, you can do that. I'll see you there. Anyways, here's me talking to some interesting people from all over the world, answering their questions about socialism.
You talk a little bit. You talk a bit about your premortum and your journaling. I'm interested. Motivation can weigh in over time, particularly in the face of setbacks.
And we have had a particularly tough year last year. What strategies can leaders, teams, people adopt to sustain that motivation and build momentum towards our goals? Yeah, to me, one of the ways we sustain momentum, and I think about this on every book project, as you start off with excitement and you're ready to go, and then you fall into what I once heard an entrepreneur call the trough of despair. And that's after the excitement wears off, and you're just in it.
And I try to look for little bits of momentum. I try to break a big, complex, hard project into as many small ones as I can. I was saying I swam at part in spring this morning. I try to swim a mile, but I don't swim a mile, right?
The pool is an eighth of a mile long, so I swim eight laps of one eighth mile. And I'm just trying to get through this small chunk, right? This is what the idea of doing just a couple of crappy pages a day is supposed to help you do as a writer also. Many, many days I would say most days I do more than the crappy minimum.
And I would say that they're so crappy. But the idea is by sort of lowering the stakes or lowering what you're trying to accomplish in a day, what you're able to do is create a sort of a minimum or a beatable goal that allows you to get that sense of momentum or progress. If you're trying to turn a freighter, right, you're not going to notice much day to day. If you have to only feel a progress because the freighter is visibly pointed in a different direction than it was when you started, that's going to be a lot of disappointing days.
If you can find benchmarks inside that where things encourage you inside that, that to me is what you want to focus on. So I try to take a big project or an overwhelming thing or an exhausting thing and break it down into smaller pieces that allow me to feel like I'm making progress and I'm checking boxes. I love that. And there's a couple of things coming through that I think build on that and relate a lot to the emotions also that you go through as a human being every day, but then you also try and bring to your work or not bring to your work.
And there's a question here around the stomach tenant of striving for contentment. How do you recommend balancing this contentment with this constant drive for growth? And is that your couple of pages a day? Is it your positive action?
How would you really balance those two things? This has made me a little controversial, but I like to tell people that I don't have goals. And I don't have goals because of something the stoics talk about, which is that you're always wanting to be focused on what's in your control. And a lot of our goals are external, right?
People are like, I want to be accepted into this university or I want to hit this best seller list or I want to be the number one salesperson. These are things that are sometimes based on measurements, but they're largely based on criteria or gatekeepers or a selection process that isn't always fair and certainly not always up to you. So I focus instead on effort. I focus on my own sort of internal metrics of like, am I giving my best?
Am I growing? Am I learning? So I am always trying to get better, but I'm not so much focused on whether other people are rewarding or recognizing or appreciating that improvement. And I realize this is a little bit counterintuitive and perhaps it's slightly more well suited to the world of being a writer than a business person.
I just think it can be so easy to get caught up in numbers or various external metrics. And what you're neglecting is the sort of day to dayness of, am I doing my best? Am I really putting myself into this? Am I really trying?
Am I doing all that I can do? And if I feel that, then I can be satisfied each and every day, whether I get the win or not, whether I get the recognition or not. And that's just kind of one of the things I think a lot about. I'm not so much motivated by how my books are selling, but how I'm growing as a writer, how I'm becoming more balanced between work and my personal life.
Am I becoming more content, as you said? Isn't to say that I'm not also trying, I'm not still trying to improve, but am I less, am I less needy? Is my ambition less external and more internal? To me, that's a sign of progress.
Am I the best at what I am capable of being? That's the race that I'm running as opposed to looking around and comparing myself to all these other people there? I'll give you one sort of beautiful image that Seneca has. He talks about this word euthymia, which to him meant tranquility, but I think also kind of means a contentment.
And he says that the key in life is to know the path that you're on. He says to have a sense of the path that you're on and not be distracted by the paths that crisscross yours. He says, especially the paths of those who are hopelessly lost. So I'm trying to get where I'm trying to go.
That's what's motivating me. I'm not complacent in that sense, but I'm content or at least inwardly focused in the sense that I'm not trying to beat anyone else. And somebody else's success does not have the power to make me unhappy or discontent about my own success or my own progress, because I understand we're running totally different races. Hey, it's Ryan.
Thank you for listening to the Daily Stood 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 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.