Can You Do This Even Here? | It's In Your Self-Interest

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/74a4fe91b15dd456

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast.
Designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues: courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom.
Into the real world.
Can you do this even here?
It was one of the noisiest places in the noisiest city in the world.
It was big enough that it would stun you even now.
The baths of Diocletian in ancient Rome could accommodate more than three thousand people.
at a time.
People from all over the empire came there to wash off, to work out, to socialize, to primp and relax.
Seneca found the noise of the baths intolerable.
He describes the sound of fat men being massaged, people jumping in the water, obnoxious people in love with their own voices, vendors hawking their wares, even a thief being arrested outside.
It's loud enough, she said, to make you hate your own ears.
So you might think
that in order to write, which he was desperately
Trying to do.
He needed to run away from it all.
Perhaps he headed out to his country estate or got up early, or stayed up late to skip the noise in the crowds.
On the contrary
Seneca sought those bats out precisely because they were noisy.
With enough practice he said he found he could think anywhere.
He could find stillness and peace.
Anywhere.
And so can we
Stillness is not something we just have. It's not a product of environmental conditions being just right or if it is, we're gonna be very vulnerable. No, stillness is something we cultivate inside ourselves.
Marcus Aurelius agreed, he said that he could retreat inside his own soul any time he wanted.
He knew that serenity and tranquility were
Or an interior state.
Yeah.
By the way, I wrote a whole book about this. It's called Stillness is the key, and it opens with this scene from Seneca. I actually was just at the bathroom in Rome recently and and standing outs. It was just a fascinating glimpse into what Seneca was talking about. You grab your sign copy stillness is the key at steward dot daily still.com.
We just got back from this trip to Europe and it was
So ungodly hot there. Like it was the hottest it's ever been.
Which exacerbated a another experience if you've ever
been to Europe, just how bad the mattresses are there. So I was excited to be home because we've been gone for a while, but I was really excited to be home and sleep on my eight
Sweep.
Pod
I missed it.
Every night I was gone. It cools the mattress, cools my wife's side differently than my side, and
Doesn't matter how hot the room is.
The bed is just perfect.
Monitors your sleep rate. I was putting my son to bed last night.
Reading to um.
And then I get a little alert on my phone.
That it was almost time for me to go to bed. That the eight sleep was doing its thing. Then I woke up this morning, it showed me my sleep score.
monitors your heart rate, your respiratory rate.
You can see the difference that having a pot on your mattress makes and their autopilot feature even learns your sleep patterns. It adjusts the temperatures, the elevation, the wake up time.
Pod users report up to 32% improvement in sleep quality and up to 34% more deep sleep.
You can use my code daily stoic at eight sleep dot com slash stoic for up to three hundred and fifty dollars off.
And you get thirty days to try it at home and return it if you don't love it. Most leaders have a clear picture of how work is supposed to get done, but they have almost no visibility into how it's actually happening day to day.
And without that visibility, you're just making decisions like what to automate or where AI is gonna be helpful.
Bas on
Not much more than your gut or
You know, how you've always done things.
And traditional.
Approaches, you know, you can hire consultants, you can map out processes. Now this could take months.
By the time you get the data, it's outdated before you
Can even use it.
And that's exactly the problem that today's sponsor, Scribe, was built to fix. Scribe is a workflow AI platform trusted by 94% of the Fortune 500, and Scribe Optimiz passively captures how your team works across approved business apps and uses AI to automatically service workflows, inefficiencies, and improvement opportunities.
There's no interviews, there's no manual discovery, there's no extra work for your team. And Optimize follows you across every tool involved. If someone starts something in Salesforce, they finish it in a completely different tool. Optimize tracks it the whole way, and Optimize shows you where your biggest inefficiencies are with AI power recommendations on how to fix them.
And it only works on applications your admin approves, so no personal activity is captured and no one's privacy is at risk. To see optimize in action, visit scribe.house stoic.
And mention stoic for a thirty day risk free trial. Scribe dot how slash stoic.
It's in your self interest.
This is
An entry from the Daily Stoic. I I realize I I'm recording at my house. I ran upstairs and I
grabbed a copy of the Daily Stoic off the shelf. I was looking for one.
I think I found a first edition'cause it doesn't say bestseller list on it. It doesn't say
How many copies uh were sold?
And it's kinda got these yellowed pages.
So pretty cool. This would have been the first edition that came out in 2016. Obviously, since printed millions of copies, it's in like 30 languages.
You can even grab a leather edition at store.dailystoic.com, but I'll get to the entry, I promise.
Today's quote is from Seneca's Moral Letters.
Therefore, explain why a wise person shouldn't get drunk. Not with words, but with the facts
Of its ugliness and offensiveness.
It's most easy to prove that
The so called pleasures when they go beyond proper measures.
Or
But punishments.
Is there a less effective technique to persuading people to do something?
Then yelling at them.
Is there anything that turns people off more than abstract notions?
That's why the stoics don't say, Stop doing this, it's a sin. Instead they say don't do this because it will make you miserable.
They don't say.
Pleasure isn't pleasurable. They say endless pleasures.
become its own form of punishment.
Their methods of persuasion hew the line in the forty eight laws of power.
Appeal to people's self interest.
Never.
To their mercy.
Or gratitude.
If you find yourself trying to persuade someone to change or to do something differently,
Remember what an effective lever self interest is.
It's not that this or that is bad. It's that
It's in their best interest to do it a different way and show them.
Don't
Moralize.
And think about what would happen if you apply this
Mine of thinking.
To your own.
behavior.
I I've sometimes said like the difference between stoicism and Christianity is the
Christian argument is like, Hey, don't do these sins, don't violate these ten commandments or
You could go to hell. And I realize this is a simplification, just bear with me. But the stoic argument is
Hey, if you do these things, and there's a similar probably list of things to do and not do.
You will live.
In a kind of hell.
Right.
The stoics certainly would have saw people get ahead doing bad things.
But they also would have seen how they
Hey.
For those
Quote unquote.
Successes.
Right.
These were some of the most miserable people. Certainly this is what Epictetus realizes living in Nero's court. He goes, Oh man.
These people weren't lucky.
They're not getting away with anything.
It's horrible to be them. I wouldn't want to be them.
At all.
I'm
Obviously thinking about this now that I have kids. You know, when you forbid someone from doing something
Or you just criticize something, what you're not doing
is explaining the why. You're not demonstrating
The Y.
And the stoic argument is like look, when you do something and you experience that
Yeah.
Yeah, the pleasure

Or what you had to do to

wrong you committed to get it that endures.
Meanwhile the other side of the argument the Stokes would say is that when you do something hard or you resist or you
Push forward.
That labor passes quickly.
But the pride in it remains. The good
Last.
A little bit longer.
And the Stoics would have tried to point out, Yeah, look, I'm not saying that it's not fun to drink, but you gotta think about what you're gonna feel like tomorrow.
You gotta think about the road you're
Going down.
The idea of justice.
You know, you were talking about this like
bit of paperwork he had to fill out and
You know, if you put one number in to pay a certain amount of tax, if you
moved the number a little lower, it was less tax.
And we were we weren't just talking about whether that was the right thing to do or not, or whether you would get caught or not, but
Again.
kind of person do you become? What kind of habit are you building?
This matters too.
Maybe karma exists.
Maybe you will go to hell for it.
But
Is it
Creating a kind of hell here.
Making you a hellish person.
Right.
Are you actually getting away with it?
Are you paying for it in another way?
That's the question I want to leave you with today.
That's to me the stoic argument. You know, I that's what so struck me about the Stoics earlier is there
They're making a pretty self interested case, a pretty logical case.
For these things.
'Cause they saw it up close and personal.
They know what happens when you go down that road.
choice of Hercules that I built the Four Virtues series around.
Seems like the road of vice is more fun than the road of virtue, but
In the end.
It isn't.
Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out. Daily Stoke.com slash email.