Your Saturday Stoic Review — Week of April 18-24

​ ​ PASSAGE OF THE WEEK: We become like the people we spend the most time with…so we should choose wisely. And we should choose widely, because life is too short to live lonely or narrowly—even for a Stoic. — You Make Your Own Good Fortune (Listen) YOUTUBE TAKEAWAY OF THE WEEK: ​ In one of the most watched videos on the Daily Stoic YouTube Channel this week, Ryan Holiday explains "one of the most life-changing exercises in all of stoic philosophy"—the concept of Memento Mori.* Memento Mori—"remember that you will die"—is the ancient practice of meditating on your mortality, not to be morbid or promote fear, but to be used as a tool to create priority and meaning. As Ryan says, Memento Mori puts everything in perspective. As Marcus Aurelius says, it shows you what's essential and what's inessential. He has this great test—Marcus says to ask yourself, am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do blank anymore? We spend so much time doing these things then we wonder, where does our time go? We spent it on frivolous and stupid things. So for the Stoics, memento mori was this humbling bit of perspective. It puts everything in sharp focus. PODCAST TAKEAWAY OF THE WEEK: ​ On the Daily Stoic podcast this week, Ryan Holiday interviewed John Mackey, the original, current, and sole CEO of Whole Foods Markets. Mackey founded Whole Foods in 1980 and has parented to Fortune 500 status, employing over 90,000 people across 450+ stores in the US, Canada, and the UK. Mackey is also the co-founder of the Conscious Capitalism Movement and co-authored the NYT and WSJ best-sellers Conscious Capitalism and Conscious Leadership. In their wide-ranging conversation, the two talked the Stoic's concept of the "circles of concern," finite vs. infinite games, avoiding binary thinking, and the impossibility of ethical purity, At the end of the day, it's all interdependent, it's all connected, and we can't change everything. You'll ruin your life by trying to analyze or research out the impacts that you have. I've seen people get their lives so overly complexified that they have trouble acting. They're like, 'you know, listen, I just don't fly anywhere because the jets put on a lot of greenhouse gases, and I'm very concerned about climate change, so I just don't fly anymore.' I've heard that a few times and I think, 'wow, you're really narrowing your life down there.' There are trade offs that occur that we have to be more conscious of. For example, I fly a lot, so I have a large carbon footprint from that perspective. On the other hand, I'm plant-based so I have less of a carbon footprint there. I would say one jet flight probably cancels out lots of veggie burgers. But my point is: the quest for perfection is impossible and will ruin your life. So it's always, how can I practically minimize my destructive harm and maximize the goodness that I do within reason? WHAT RYAN HOLIDAY IS READING: "When one looks back across a chasm of seventy years, through a prism of pulp fiction and bad gangster movies, there is a tendency to view the events of 1933-34 as mythic, as folkloric. To the generations of Americans raised since World War II, the identities of criminals such as Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, "Ma" Barker, John Dillinger, and Clyde Barrow are no more real than are Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones. After decades spent in the washing machine of popular culture, their stories have been bled of all reality, to an extent that few Americans today know who these people actually were, much less that they all rose to national prominence at the same time. They were real." — Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 by Bryan Burrough (Signed by Bryan Burrough) YOUR STOIC WEEKEND REMINDER: You don't control what happens, but you always control how you respond to what happens. The single most important practice in Stoic philosophy is differentiating between what we can change and what we can't. What we have influence over and what we do not. Epictetus explained just how to do that: The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own… (For more on this idea, watch this video!) THIS WEEK'S BEST SOCIAL MEDIA POST: ​ EMAIL OF THE WEEK: ​You'll Be Stressed Either Way (Listen) *P.S. Earlier this week, we announced Daily Stoic's newest creation: The Memento Mori Calendar. ​ The average human lifespan nowadays is 80 years. That means, your life is made up of (hopefully) 4,160 weeks. So the Memento Mori Calendar has 4,160 dots, each dot representing a week of your life and each row representing 2 years of your life. By filling in the Memento Mori Calendar every week, you will not only see how much life you've already lived (or as Seneca says, how much you've already died), but also how much life you've (hopefully) got left. And of course, none of those to-be-filled-in dots are guaranteed. Every day it is true: this could be your last day on this planet. As wonderful as it would be if there was no such thing as death, we have to use death as a tool. We have to use it as a spur to move us forward. We have to use it as a reminder of what's truly important and we have to be made better for the fact that we don't know how much time we have. We never do. And we never will. Memento Mori. For more, go to dailystoic.com/mmcalendar​ ​ ​ ​Unsubscribe | Update your profile | 906 Main Street #274, Bastrop, Texas 78602