Empower Yourself with This | Why You Need to Get In the Arena
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What common struggles do we face in our daily lives?
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. It's the most empowering thing. We all have those days when we'd rather just not. Days when we'd rather not deal with an annoying coworker or a petty family member. Days when we'd rather not bother with all the work we have to do, all the responsibilities we have to manage. Days where the awfulness and corruption of the world gets to us and we'd rather just not get out of bed that day. And Marcus Aurelius and all the Stoics, of course, knew days like this. Life was one thing after another for them, too. Think of Marcus Aurelius' life. We have a plague.
How did Marcus Aurelius respond to life's challenges?
We have famine. We have backstabbing. We have wars. He does not meet with the good fortune he deserved, one ancient historian noted, as his whole reign was a series of troubles. It would have been easy for him to give up trying to retreat into luxury or pleasure. It would have been easy for him to allow the indelible stain of power to ruin him, as it had for so many emperors before him. Yet within the pages of meditations, we witness Marcus Aurelius doing something very different. We see him fighting to be the person philosophy tried to make him. No role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you are in right now, he writes in meditations. He was saying that we don't just talk about philosophy, we have to apply it to our daily lives, whatever profession and place we happen to occupy.
And that's why if you're interested in Stoic philosophy or philosophy in general, Meditations by Mark Schwelis is the first thing to read, according to Arthur Brooks when he came on the Daily Stoic podcast. It's the most empowering thing I've ever read, he said, especially since I read it when I was young. He said it's always been incredibly important to me. And the reason that he and thousands of other people say this is because in meditations, Marcus is showing us that it doesn't matter how rich or powerful or famous we are, that life will still include pain and suffering. Life will still throw obstacles that seem difficult at us. What matters is how we respond to those things. We shouldn't assume that something is impossible because we find it hard, Marcus writes in Meditations, but recognize that if it's humanly possible, you can do it too.
And it's ideas like this that explain why Meditations has been this sort of secret of leaders and ordinary people for almost 2,000 years. That people, whether they're military leaders or students or entrepreneurs or artists or stay-at-home parents or championship athletes, they've turned to meditations for guidance. And it's why for over a decade here at Daily Stoic, for almost 20 years in my life, I've been trying to make this work accessible to people. And it's why we're doing Meditations Month here at Daily Stoic in honor of Marcus's birthday. We're doing this deep dive into meditations, what it means. We put together this really cool sort of guide book club that we're all doing together. We're doing a Q&A about it.
It's free for anyone who grabs the guide. Plus, we've got the leather-bound edition of Meditations. Meditations Month has been awesome. I'll link to that in today's show notes, or you can just go to dailystoic.com slash meditations to get the bundles of all that stuff I was just talking about. or just go to your local library and grab a copy. I don't care.
What is the significance of Theodore Roosevelt's 'Man in the Arena' speech?
Just bring Marcus into your life. It's one of the most important and empowering decisions you will ever make.
Maybe you've been hearing the buzz about live shopping lately. I know I have. And it makes sense. Like people are already on their phones. They're hanging out. They're looking for stuff to do. So why wouldn't business want to meet people where they're at? If you're hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk into your store, I know a little bit about that. You're setting yourself up for disappointment on whatnot. You can go live and sell directly to people in real time.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What common struggles do we face in our daily lives?
0:00–0:53
2
How did Marcus Aurelius respond to life's challenges?
0:53–3:48
3
What is the significance of Theodore Roosevelt's 'Man in the Arena' speech?
3:48–4:56
4
How does Stoicism encourage us to engage with the world?
4:56–6:26
5
What lessons can we learn from Marcus Aurelius's 'Meditations'?
6:26–8:07
6
Why is self-discipline essential for personal growth?
8:07–10:00
7
What role does self-promise play in achieving our goals?
10:00–12:30
8
How can we apply Stoic philosophy to our everyday lives?
12:30–15:09
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Daily Stoic
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