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The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash stoic. Welcome to the daily stoic podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Epic Tetus was born into slavery. This would have been a profoundly painful experience that left many scars and many disadvantages. His 30 years in bondage left him with a limp for the rest of his life, courtesy of a sadistic owner who tortured him.
In Rome, at that time, many people believed that only free people were capable of being educated. But the indisputable truth that Epic Tetus saw every day in the moral disorder and dysfunction of Nero's court, whereas Master served as a high profile secretary, was that it was, in fact, the opposite. Only the educated, he said, were free. And this is something that Seneca points out about the same period in Rome, how profoundly unfree many of the richest and most powerful people are. And this is true 20 odd centuries later. Most people are enslaved and controlled and directed
by their ignorance, their impulses, their temper, their desires, and delusions. What Epic Tetus came to understand is that wisdom is freedom, from the things that have enslaved and controlled and directed people for all time, from ignorance, from stupid opinions, from immature emotions, and childish impulses, from desires and delusions, from bitterness and frustration and resentment. That's the point of wisdom, he said, to argue less, to rage less, to be upset less, to enjoy Epic Tetus said, a smooth flow of life. But this now it's also believed that wisdom is something we have to work for, not something that we're given. It didn't matter then if you were a slave, like, a pectetus or raised as royalty, like Marcus Aurelius, wisdom was something you had to earn.
And how did you earn it? Through hard work, through reading and thinking and reflecting, through mentors and teachers, through painful trial and error, through opening yourself to experiences and knowledge outside of your comfort zone. I think the one thing we can say very clearly about wisdom is that you're not born with it, right? You can be born smart, you can't be born wise. Wisdom is something you earn. Two tasks.
Squandering of your potential. How does one do that? Okay, that is a tougher question. But the philosophy we see from the Stoics makes it simple enough. Say no to distractions, to destructive emotions, to outside pressure. Ask yourself,
what is it that only I can do? What is the best use of my limited time on this planet? Try to do the right thing when the situation calls for it. Treat other people the way you would hope to be treated. And understand that every small choice and tiny matter is an opportunity to practice these larger principles. That's it. That's what goes into the most important skill of all.
How to live. I would say two things. Maybe Epictetus wouldn't have agreed that you have to pursue the occupation that you love because he lived in a time where people had a lot less control. Maybe he would have firmly put that in the camp of things that are not up to us. Mark Schreelis didn't seem to think he had much say over whether he was emperor or not. But of course we've made some progress. Now
you don't have to follow in your father's footsteps. Another link in a long chain of accountants or police officers or politicians or notaries or whatever you can do what you want to do. At the same time, I don't know if Epictetus thought he had that much control because he didn't. He was enslaved. He eventually found his freedom. He did find what he was good at, what he was meant to do.
So maybe he would have agreed. We do know there's something from Epictetus and Musonius Rufus where they say basically like you're talking to a young kid who says, you know, my father won't let me study philosophy. And he says, you know, if you really wanted to study philosophy, your father can't possibly prevent you from doing that. And I think that's true. Anyways, that's advice I'll monitor. I try to
remind myself, be a good person, do what you love, focus on what's right. And look, if you don't lose track of time, if you don't forget what day it is, maybe you don't like what you do that much. Right? Time feels like it's going by, internmentally slow. You're probably focused on the wrong things.
This is an entry from the Daily Stoic 10th anniversary edition, which is out now has been updated and informed by a decade of writing and reading about the Stoics. More than 60 new translations, it's got new meditations, new stories, and expanded glossary. A bunch of awesome stuff. I think I really like it. You can grab all that at dailystowak.com slash ds10. I'll link to that in
today's show notes. Thanks to everyone who's supported the book over the years, dailystowak.com slash ds10. I started Ornada in 2013, and we make like apparel. The best part of Shopify for me is our ability to run the business as essentially non-technical people. We're able to admin everything on the back end front end and sell things online easily. If Shopify were a bike accessory,
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