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, to 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. We find ourselves baffled by our politicians, by our bosses, by our leaders.
Why don't we do something? Why don't they just do the right thing? Why are they always putting profits over people? Why do they always hedge their bets?
You say this as you sit there in a job you've hated for the last five years. You say this when you avoid talking politics with your family because it's unpleasant. You say this when you make all sorts of compromises and trade-offs that you know are not right. You say this while you're wearing clothes made in a sweatshop.
Pay your employees less than you could afford to travel the country with horrible human rights records, drive cars that are horrible for the environment. It's not that you're a bad person, it's that you have a reason for all those things we all do. We have a million reasons. Then we like to direct a very pointed, very black and white accusing finger, and everyone else who dares to do the same.
Marcus Aurelius reminds us that what other people do and say is not important. Or rather it's not as important as what we do and we say. What do we have control over? Those politicians thousands of miles away who are just barely interested in our votes?
Or our own decisions and actions on a day-to-day basis? Don't waste your time in vaying against the hypocrisy of others. Start with the hypocrisy in your own home because there's plenty of it there. What are you doing today, tomorrow?
What injustices are you resolving in your own life? What evil are you ceasing to participate in? What good are you doing? What courage are you showing?
What are your answers? Not politicians or leaders or your neighbors or your bosses? How about what counts? That is what you do.
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I think two more are being talked about, but I'm doing on September 17th at the Westlake Performing Arts Center here in Austin. Then in February, I'm in San Diego, and the other ones are still being worked out. And grab tickets to that. I would love to see you here in Austin.
Tickets are at dailystowaklive.com. And I'll link to that in today's show notes as well. Last time I did live dates, where was I? Was in London.
I was in Ireland. I was in the Netherlands. For that I did Australia. So when I do these live events, they're usually not in the US.
So if you are in the US and you want to come see me, I would love to come see you. And I would love to answer your questions. That's often when I'm bringing you in these Thursday Q&As is some of the questions that I get to answer when I do talk. So if you want to ask me a question, if you want to come see me at Kiva Talk, it's one of the first times I've talked about the ideas in the new book, Wisdom Takes Work.
So again, grab tickets at dailystowaklive.com. And in the interim, here is some Q&A from a live event I did remotely. I was here in Texas. They were all over the world.
And they called in, they asked questions, I answered them. And it was really interesting. So I'll bring you some of that Q&A now. And I hope to see you on September 17th here in Austin or in San Diego in February or stay tuned to the landing page for the other events coming up soon.
We'll probably get two questions and then we'll let you go. And thank you for your time, of course. Emotions often overall are first action. So you talk about not sending that email or maybe taking a second.
What services and guides do you have to help manage those and get sadness, et cetera, before the action takes hold? I think there's a magical tool that the ancients invented and it's called taking a walk. And when I get outside and I get moving before I do the thing that I was inclined to do, I tend to chill out, right? And I get some perspective and I get a little bit of space.
Of course, journaling is a similar practice. It's just this idea of maybe pausing a little bit or just questioning, you know, the Epicurians are in the ancient world are sort of the rivals of the stoics. They get a bad rap too. We tend to think of the Epicurians as these pleasure loving he-ness.
But actually one of the things that Epicurus says is that before you engage in any sort of pleasure, you have to ask yourself, how are you going to feel the next day? And so his point is like drinking might be pleasurable, but if you have to weigh the hangover that you feel the next day against it. And I think that's a really important, the ability to go, hey, I want to do this, I'm thinking about doing this or my emotions or my impulses are telling me to do this. But I also have the ability to think about how I'm going to think about it later.
And I have to sort of weigh those things. And that gives us the ability to go, okay, actually that's probably a bad idea. I love that. One final question.
When you started this practice, Ryan, what was the biggest challenge you felt? What was the biggest challenge you faced? And how did you overcome that? Well, I would say here that I didn't just start this practice, but I am currently engaged in this practice and very much in work in progress with this practice.
Like I hope that it doesn't come up that I am a master of stoic philosophy. I would say I am a student of stoic philosophy. My wife likes to joke that one of us is a stoic and the other writes about stoicism. And so I remain flummoxed and I make mistakes and I get caught up by things.
I hit send on that email plenty of times, perhaps more times than I don't. So stoicism is a work in progress. It is a philosophy that you are supposed to be studying rather than a philosophy that you have studied. But I will say maybe just connecting to your guys' line of work I spent most of my 20s as a marketer and I had a successful marketing career and then I built a successful marketing agency.
I worked with all sorts of exciting brands and people and public figures. But I wrestled with as I think a lot of the people that you guys work with and perhaps many of the people on this call wrestle with, which is like, just because you're really good at something or just because something is lucrative, that doesn't mean that's what you should spend your life doing and how if you feel called to make a change, even inside, a call from one company to the next or one position to the next to go from sales to a leadership role or a support role or a traveling role versus a stay at home. There's all these changes we can make and wrestling with making that choice, taking that leap and one of the stoic virtues is the virtue of courage. And obviously this is not the same as courage is running into a burning building or onto the battlefield, but working up that courage to make a change in your life, to try something new, to put yourself out there, to go towards more what you feel called to do.
That's a really hard thing. But I think these when we look back at our lives, those are the choices we're really glad that we made. Ryan, thank you so much. It's been really insightful to hear from you and I can see in the chat that everyone has taken so much inspiration from your perspective.
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 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 sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.
Thank you.