Chapter 1: What key Stoic virtues are introduced in this episode?
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.
They felt the same way as you. They were scared. They were nervous. They were frustrated. They were confused. They were tired. It's easy to think that the ancient Greeks and Romans were somehow very different than us, their lives far removed from our own.
Of course, what a great historian is able to do is make it clear how untrue that is. As John Meacham has said, our ancestors did not dwell in some land called history or the past. Like all of us, they dwelt in a vivid, living, chaotic present. Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and Cato were all concerned about their declining institutions. They stressed about new technology.
They wondered if it was the beginning of the end of their country. They dealt with wars and natural disasters and fads and trends.
Chapter 2: How do historical figures relate to our modern struggles?
But unlike us, as we read about these historical events, they did not know how it would end. They did not know whether they were doing the right thing or not.
They were taking it day by day, doing their best, which is all we can do, which is what we must do.
Like them, we have to keep showing up, keep serving, keep trying to do the right thing in difficult times.
That's what every generation is asked to do, to play our part without knowing how the story ends.
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Chapter 3: What lessons can we learn from ancient leaders like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius?
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W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. Whatnot.com slash sell. Look, it's good that you read. It's good that you read a lot. But if you can't remember what you're reading, if all this is just going in a black hole somewhere, you have a massive problem, right? Because a lot of what we read now, a lot of what we are learning now, it is valuable and we may need it, just not at this moment.
So the question becomes, how do you collect, organize, preserve all the things that you're reading and learning? Because the cost of forgetting a story or a lesson can be really high. It could be money. It could be time. It could be relationship, right? Like you're reading about something now that could be of great benefit to you in the future. It could be the solution to your problem.
It could save you. But if you don't remember it, if you haven't recorded it, if you can't easily access it, you may as well never have read it in the first place. What reading is, is a way to learn from the experiences of others. We have to record and capture and preserve that information. I've read thousands and thousands of books over the course of my life.
And before that, I was a research assistant under the great Robert Greene, who taught me a lot of what we're going to talk about in today's episode. And then my own learning and experience writing the books that I've done and having this job for many years. I'm going to give you my four-part system that can help you remember and use everything you're reading and learning.
So first, let's talk about how to read. Obviously, you know how to read, but if you're not reading with a pen, you might as well not be reading, in my opinion. To me, reading is something you do actively. You're reading, you're taking notes, you're highlighting things, you're marking things. I don't care what kind of pen you use, what kind of highlighter you use, whatever it is.
The point is you should be reading and selecting and noting things that stand out to you. For some reason, I like to use Sharpies. So like you can see here, this is a page I'm marking with a Sharpie. I'm folding one page.
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Chapter 4: How can we actively engage with what we read?
I'm marking to continue to the next one. I'm marking things I wanna use in my books. If you have a thought, if you have a disagreement, if you really like something, that's what the pen is for. This is called marginalia. It's something that the greatest writers and thinkers have always done. I learned this in David McCullough's book on John Adams.
You can see these are all the pages I folded, and then I'll show you some of the notes that I took in mind. But in one book that he read on the French Revolution, his marginalia totaled something like 12,000 words. And McCullough points out that he read thinkers like Adam Smith. He agreed with them in some cases, disagreed with them in other cases. He made connections. He made notations.
And that's what he's doing as an active reader. The point is reading should be active and it should be engaging. You shouldn't agree with everything. You shouldn't accept everything unthinkingly. You shouldn't even like everything. often tweak or criticize sentences that I don't like, metaphors or similes that I think are lame, stylistic choices that I like, dislike.
They call reading the classics the great conversation. I think that's a great way to think about it. This is, in fact, a conversation. It's a dialogue between you and the writers. You know, some people are reluctant to do this because they want to preserve their books. They want to protect their books. No, books are meant to be read and used.
Not only did I write in this one, I was scribbling with Sharpie on the cover. There's food stains you can see here. I put hundreds of miles on this book. I took it on airplanes. I took it on car trips. I sat and ate my lunch over it. The point is I am engaging with the thing that David McCullough spent years of his life producing.
I am not treating it like it's this delicate, fragile little thing. No, I'm integrating into my life. I'm engaging with it. I'm subjecting it to the test, right? So part of what we're doing when we're reading is setting ourselves up for future success. Now, can you also do this on an ebook? Yes.
But I actually think it's the act of reading it physically, engaging with it that is so valuable, which leads me to my next point. Speed reading is bullshit. You're not trying to burn through these books as fast as possible. Mark Shurilis talks about this in Meditations that he learns from his philosophy teacher. This is a passage here I underlined.
In book one of Meditations, Mark Shurilis thanking what he learned from his philosophy teacher, Junius Rusticus. I'll read it for you here. I've underlined it and highlighted it multiple times over 20 plus years. He says, from Rusticus, he learned to read attentively and not be satisfied with just getting the gist of it.
It'd be better to read fewer books and really understand them, really process them, really take, extract from them everything that they contain than read tons and tons of books and get nothing from them. So the next thing I do after I read a book like this, after I've marked all these pages is I just let it sit for a little bit. They sit on a pile next to my desk.
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Chapter 5: What is the importance of taking notes while reading?
And then here's me riffing on it. I said, what does it matter if an atom makes your heart flutter? Because as Aristotle said, another bit of reading I did, philosophy begins in wonder. No one can accomplish greatness in any field if they're not driven by love and fascination and genuine reverence.
So the point is we're collecting this stuff so we can use it in my case as a writer, but maybe in your case, in a speech that you're giving, in a business plan that you're writing or an art project that you're doing. or maybe just something you're collecting for a subject you're trying to wrap your head around. And then here we have another quote from Feynman talking about Descartes.
This is page 118, we have a quote. Do you know who first explained the true origin of the rainbow? I asked. It was Descartes, he said, and in a moment he looked me in the eye. And what do you think was the salient feature of the rainbow that inspired Descartes' mathematical analysis, he asked.
Well, the rainbows actually starts to explain it and then Feynman cuts him off and he says, you're overlooking a key feature of the phenomenon. Okay, I give up. What would you say inspired his theory? I would say his inspiration was that he thought rainbows were beautiful. So I just love little stories like that. I think the Greek term for him was akraia.
They're little sort of anecdotes, moral lessons, moral stories that you tell and it helps you capture and understand the essence of someone, but also the essence of the world or some truth about the human experience. And look, all of this would be impossible for Bean to keep
in my brain i could keep some of it but not all of it and so it's the process of writing and rewriting and organizing and putting them in these little file folders that allows me to engage with the material over and over and over again i remember i asked robert green i was like can i just do this all digitally and he's like no the whole point is that it's physical not just the painful part of doing it like when i read a big book like this sometimes the reason i take a couple weeks before i pick it up or months this would be multiple days work
right? Transferring these extracts might take two or three days of work, but it's not just that that is important, like sweating for it, you really learn it. But having it here, having it laid out allows me to organize it, put it in themes, but move them around and go, actually, no, this doesn't go here. This goes here. This belongs in two categories. And now I've got to write it again.
And I'm engaging with the material again. So it's creating the recall, the familiarity, But also in my brain, I have a sense of where they all go, what belongs with each other. And then I can see as I'm writing a book or as I'm researching and accumulating a book where these themes have started to come together. So I have commonplace books for each of the books that I write.
I have commonplace books about philosophy. I have a commonplace book of just life advice, just things that I try to apply as a person and as a parent. So you can do this however you want for whatever you're doing.
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