How Could It Possibly Help You? | Test Your Impressions
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Try it today at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law, not available in all states. 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 to 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. How could this possibly help you?

It was never meant to be seen by prying eyes. It certainly wasn't meant to be published as a book. It was written in an antiquated foreign language full of ancient philosophy that until recently few had ever even heard of. And the man doing the writing lived a life unimaginably different and distant from yours.

Why would you bother reading a book like that? How could it possibly affect and improve your life? Yet this is a book that Frederick the Great reportedly rode into battle with in his saddlebags, as did four-star General James Mattis, who carried it with him on deployments throughout the Middle East.

It's a book that American presidents have read and raved about. It is a book that Robert Louis Stevenson, the great novelist, described as unlike any other. It's a book that actresses and musicians and entrepreneurs are still reading to this day. So why has Meditations by Marcus Aurelius endured and influenced across so many centuries?

And what makes its ancient wisdom still relevant to the modern problems we face today? It's because in meditations, Marcus attempts to answer the questions we all end up asking ourselves at some point. What's the good life? How do I live it? How do I stop running from pain and misfortune and start dealing with my problems? How do I learn how to treat other people when they can be so petty and miserable and annoying? How do I treat myself better?

And Marcus Aurelius answers these questions with clarity and wisdom in meditations. In fact, he gives us a kind of guidebook for living, a set of rules to live our life by, practical exercises that made him a better person and can make you one too.

That is why people have read meditations for the last 2000 years. That's why it's the favorite of presidents and prisoners, men and women, soldiers and activists, entrepreneurs and everyday people. But as Heraclitus said, you can't step in the same river twice because the river changes and so have you. And meditations in that way is a book you're supposed to read more than once.

And while meditations can be easy to read, it's also the work of a lifetime to explore its vast depths.

which is what we've been working on over here at Daily Stoic for the last couple of years. We've been trying to create like a kind of a guide to meditations, a companion to help you make your way through the book, not just once, but over and over and over again. And we've spent hundreds of thousands of hours, not just with the text itself, but also with experts and translators and biographers and students of Stoicism to help understand what each phrase and idea and concept in it

it means. And we put that together. It's called How to Read Marcus Aurelius. It's a guide we've done. And we're relaunching it because we're going to do a book club discussion and Q&A about it on April 26th, which is Marcus's birthday. So anyone who takes the course can participate in that. And

And if you haven't read Meditations, we've got a great edition. We've got a leather edition in the Daily Stoic store. And then I'm excited to say that I wrote a new foreword for the Gregory Hayes translation, which is coming out in hardcover and paperback, I guess, audiobook and e-book.

If you haven't read Meditations or you want to read this, I think that's really exciting. You can grab that. I think it'll do well. I think you will enjoy it. It's really awesome. I'll link to all this in today's show notes, obviously. Or you can just go over to dailystoic.com slash meditations to check it out.

Test your impressions. This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living, which I myself just worked on this morning. I do the journal every morning.

One of Epictetus' key teachings was all about testing our impressions, any experience, perception, or circumstance that was in front of us. And he uses a key verb to emphasize this practice 10 times in discourses and once in the opening of the Incaridian. And the word carries the meaning of the assayer, one who tests fine metals and coins to verify their authenticity.

In one of the most memorable uses, Epictetus compares our need to test impressions to what is done with coins and how the skilled merchant can hear a counterfeit coin cast upon a table just as a musician would detect a sour note. So this week, go through the process of assaying everything that comes before you, assuming it all to be counterfeit or misleading until we can prove otherwise.

And, you know, it's funny. I think I've really first wrapped my head around this idea of to assay or the word assay because at Cerro Gordo, you may have heard my interview with Brent Underwood, who's one of my longtime, I guess he was formerly my intern and great guy who works at Brass Check. He's one of the partners and he's helped build Daily Stoic and someone I talk to on the phone almost every day. And a few years ago, he bought this ghost town in the mountains of Southern California called Cerro Gordo. And he's been trying to sort of turn it into this like resort place.

But anyways, when I went out and visited, he showed me this building and it's called the assay office. So the miners would pull this silver out of the ground in the ore or whatever. And sometimes they, I don't know exactly how it works, but they would take it to this office. And this is where like the guy with a brain, the dispassionate observer, the money man would test it and let them know like just what they found, how rich it was, how valuable it was, what percentage it was this or that or this. This was like the filter through which all the rocks flowed.

pulled out of this mining town were filtered through. And just because you thought it was valuable, it didn't matter unless the SA office came through and said, boom, boom, boom, and stamped it and gave it, you know, another funny little thing is that the brothel was located immediately next door. So you'd find out you'd just become a rich man. And then, of course, you go do your business. But the idea is you have to put everything to the test. And that's what Epictetus is saying. He says, when it comes to money where we feel our clear interest, we have an entire art where the tester uses many means to discover the worth.

just as we give great attention to judging things that might steer us badly. But when it comes to our own ruling principle, we yawn and doze off, accepting any appearances that flash by without counting the costs. That's from Discourses 120. And then he says in 2.18, first off, don't let the force of an impression carry you away. Say to it, hold it up a bit and let me see who you are and where you are from. Let me put you to the test.

And then in Incaridian, he says, from the very beginning, make it your practice to say to every harsh impression, you are an impression and not at all what you appear to be. Next, examine it and test it by the rules you possess, the first and greatest of which is this, whether it belongs to the things in our control or not in our control. And if the latter, prepare to respond, it is nothing to me.

So, look, if you went and got your rocks tested at Cerro Gordo and they found out to be worthless stones, you wouldn't be like, but I want them to be what they are. I'm going to continue to pretend. Right. You wouldn't spend money that you just found out you don't actually have. So this process of testing one's perceptions and one's facts is a really essential part of the process. You can't just go through life alone.

pretending things are what they are or taking them at first glance because there are so many factors at play from cognitive biases to your upbringing to just misleading appearances. You have to put everything to the test. You have to see things as they actually are. And this process of saying everything that's in front of you is a key stoic exercise. And I hope you can build on this practice this week. Slow down.

Take a minute, put it to the test. See if it's real or counterfeit. See if it's what everyone else wants you to see. Or as Marcus Aurelius says, see what is really there.

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 of 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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