Can You Not Do It Even When You Really Want To? | Ask Daily Stoic
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I think when things are difficult or we know things are going to lead to hard conversations or changes we have to make in our life, we come up with reasons not to do them. When I think about therapy, I think, how can I make this as easy to do as possible? Whether that's like scheduling a bunch of appointments in a row, whether it's doing it remotely so I don't have to get in my car and drive somewhere. Like, I want to eliminate the excuses that

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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 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off

with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com. Can you not do it even when you really want to? Look, if you hated the taste, if it didn't feel good, if you weren't getting good results, if it didn't guarantee a dopamine hit, it wouldn't exactly require much discipline to steer clear.

That's the whole point of the virtue, though, isn't it? That it's requiring you to resist an impulse or forgo a pleasure. As we said recently, discipline is about doing what's hard. Just as courage is the triumph over fear, discipline is the triumph over another lower part of our nature. A lot of times discipline is pushing yourself to do something you don't want to do. But the other part of it, which we might call the temperance part, is not doing the stuff you want to do.

And in some ways, this takes the most strength. Seneca said that we're all slaves to one thing or another, sex or ambition or attention or chaos. And by indulging in these passions often enough, eventually we lose the freedom to abstain from them. We just can't not. We need discipline to push through that, to resist the urge to keep going when it's not serving us, to step back when our ambition tempts us to overreach, to recognize that rest and recovery and restraint are not signs of weakness, but also of strength and wisdom.

True discipline means knowing when to stop. It's having the courage to say no to the extra hour, the extra project, the unsustainable pace so that we can sustain ourselves for the long haul. Discipline in this way isn't just about action. It's also about control, control over our impulses, our desires, even our most deeply ingrained habits. Without this, we are slaves. Only through temperance can we ever be free.

And I talk a lot about that in Discipline is Destiny. I didn't just want it to be a book about do this, do this. There's a bunch of things we need to stop doing, and discipline is understanding that. You can grab a signed copy at store.dailystoic.com.

But if you are looking for some better overall habits, you might like our Daily Stoic course, Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness, which is a six-week deep dive into better Stoic habits, which you can sign up for right now. Or you can join us in Daily Stoic Life and get it and all our other courses for free. I'll link to that in today's show notes.

Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Back in November, I was on that little tour. I was in Europe and Canada. London was the first stop. It was at the Troxy. I was very nervous. It was a lot. I did an hour Q&A, then an hour talk, then another hour Q&A. But the first couple, I brought my kids. It was their first time in London. We all got food poisoning on the first day.

Thanks, British Airways. Really appreciate it. It was my son's birthday and we got there. We were taken to this restaurant he really wanted to go to. He wanted to go to burgers and lobsters. He was so excited and then blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, it was like that for a while. But recovered in time for the talk. And here are some questions I answered from the lovely folks in London. Enjoy. My question is regarding intuition. Okay.

An Indian philosopher might be quoted with saying that the instinct might be the spontaneous reaction of the body, so the intuition can be a lot of the spontaneous reaction of the soul. I wouldn't necessarily say that intuition is a bad thing, but yet the Stoics instruct us to not act on our immediate reactions. So I want to know what you think about intuition or what the Stoics would think about it.

I think it's critical that the Stokes are saying don't act on your first impression. They're saying take that impression and put it up to the test. Sometimes it is true and sometimes it is not, right? So they're not saying that your first impression is always wrong. They're just saying that our first impressions, our intuition is sometimes wrong or even often wrong. So that the discipline, the self-awareness,

process by which you can pause and reflect and then act is the thing we are training to do. And look, I think intuition has to be trained itself. A lot of people go, oh, I'm going to, you know, I trust my gut. But have they done the work? You know, I'm going to trust, you're trusting your intuition here. But have you actually done the work to generate that intuition? Is that intuition based on anything real?

Right? Like experience and understanding and training? Or is it, you know, ego and instinct and wishful thinking? So I have no problem with intuition per se. I just try to make sure that I'm trying to think these things through first.

Thank you very much for your daily story podcast. Please keep doing that because I enjoy it every day, like on a daily basis. So if I would have in my life time to read just one book, what would be the book you would recommend me to read? Why do you only have time to read one book? I reject the premise. Please tell me five then.

No, Seneca says that we want to linger on the works of the master thinker. So it's not that you're reading thousands and thousands of books to check them off the list. I do think as you read, you want to find the books that really resonate with you, that really speak to you, and you want to read them over and over again. Every year I try to pick a handful of books I'm going to reread on top of books that I'm going to read because the Stokes talk about how we never step in the same river twice. As I was saying, this is almost 20 years later

with me and meditations, and so each time I go back to it, I find something new, and that process of coming back to it and getting something new out of it is a key part, so I don't actually reject the premise. If there was one or two books that I could choose, you were going to read them over and over again, you know, Mark Smith's Meditations wouldn't be a bad choice, certainly, but you just want general book recommendations that I like? Oh, that have impacted me a lot?

Well, this is also hard for me because the premise of my bookstore is that it's only my favorite books and we have a thousand titles. I'll take the easy way out and put meditations at the top and then I'll come up with some more for you. Yeah, of course. Hello, Ryan. I'm Renita from Mexico.

Yeah, I have read many of your books and I followed you for some time and when I knew that you were going to be here exactly today for my birthday, which I was going to do some sightseeing in London. Oh, amazing. Universe. Yeah. So I'm very happy. Nice to meet you. Good to meet you too. In person and I have a question for you. Okay. I work as a psychologist, a psychotherapist and I try to

every day in my professional practice and as a human being. And I have read about your kids. I've seen their pictures and they're really young. The question is, what do you do when my daughter is 26 and she is not as disciplined as I would like her to be? And I try to convince her, to motivate her. I know that there are some personality traits that are hard to change, but I would like to see.

Were you as disciplined as you should have been when you were 26? Not that... in the middle. No, I... In the middle. I get it. Look, I think when I was 26, there were things I was too disciplined about and there were things I was not disciplined enough about. And, you know, it took some experience

Screwing up and getting imbalanced in some ways and you know, it took me a while to work it out Which is what our our 20s are for of course What life is for is sort of figuring it out. We're constantly Twisting the dials. I certainly wouldn't have been that responsive to my parents trying to tell me, you know anything Not that I would be responsive even now and my little kids Are not responsive either

This is the challenge of parenting. Marcus Aurelius being the ultimate example of this, having Joaquin Phoenix as Commodus, but maybe worse in real life as his son. I'm fascinated by how it goes so badly for Marcus and why it goes so badly so often. Why great men and women of history so often have such

I don't know, what's a nice way to say this? Why their kids have so many problems. Commodus, Churchill's son Randolph, Queen Elizabeth has a couple troubled children. Cyrus the Great's son was about as bad as Commodus, you know, on and on. Was that because the parents were too busy saving the world and saving everyone else and they neglected the family?

Was the parent actually the opposite? Were they too attentive and overbearing and the child was like that out of spite or in defiance? Was it, I don't know, the strictness of Marcus Ruius made him a complete softie when it came to his kids and he indulged them? Was it just random genetics? I don't know. You're the psychologist.

But it's hard, it's hard. I would say probably patience, understanding, gentle prodding, space, and leading by example are probably our best bets. Thank you very much.

Hi Ryan. Hi. I've noticed you're wearing an Iron Maiden t-shirt. Oh yeah. Just wondered, because I know that the lyrics in some of the songs are very profound, I wondered if there was a particular one that you could share and worry on. I would say, and I just saw it written in Sacramento last month, it was incredible.

I've always wondered why they don't have any explicit songs about the Stoics. It seems like they've got stories about basically everything else at this point. I guess the people that then do is loosely based on a line from Julius Caesar, which is also a play about Cato, so that's maybe the closest explicit connection.

But if I had to pick a sort of stoic theme in any of their books, or sorry, in their songs, I would probably pick "Wasted Years," which is all about sort of seizing the moment and realizing that sort of now is the golden years. It's not some.

moments in the future that you're gonna look back on fondly, it's right now and you're wasting it. There's a, I think, a real strong memento mori theme in there that I've always been struck by. And maybe there's some fascinating memento mori theme in "How I'd Be Like Me," which is about a man who's been sentenced to death and he's on his way to the gallows. So that's my answer. I could nerd out for quite a while longer, but I'll spare all of you.

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 the 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.

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