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Saturday, October 29, 2022
Your Saturday Stoic Review — Week of October 24 - 30
PASSAGE OF THE WEEK:
We don't despair of a goal because we're not perfect, Epictetus said. We strive to get closer to it each day. We strive to get better each day. This, as Marcus might have written to himself, is your reminder.
"I believe that life operates on two levels. The higher level is the muse level—the level of your calling. The lower level is our material plane. On that lower level is the force that I call Resistance with a capital R. That's there to stop us from reaching the higher level…The purpose of discipline is discipline is what takes you to that higher level. That's why you have to have it. You can't wish your way there. You can't chant your way there. You can't—that book The Secret—vibe or manifest your way there. The law of attraction is bullshit—it is not going to get you there. The only way you get there is through hard work. You've got to punch your ticket and pay the price."
In a great recent episode of the Daily Stoic podcast, Ryan Holiday talked to Maya Smart about her book Reading for Our Lives (which you can pick up at the Painted Porch Bookshop), cultivating a love of reading in kids, the challenges of writing a book, and how Maya had to start saying No so she could say Yes to writing the book:
"I had to start setting boundaries…Because of my interest in this topic, I was very involved in library foundation boards, literacy coalition boards, and all kinds of other volunteering related to the topic of the book but not writing. Steven Pressfield writes about this—this idea that you do this shadow work. For me, it was volunteering. I'm not writing my book raising a reader. I'm volunteering, I'm planning this event, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. So I started resigning from boards and telling people, 'I'm no longer able to do this thing that I used to do because I'm focused on this book.'"
"When you need encouragement, think of the qualities the people around you have: this one's energy, that one's modesty, another's generosity, and so on. Nothing is as encouraging as when virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us, when we're practically showered with them. It's good to keep this in mind."
You've probably caught yourself doing it. Life has been rough or depressing, but your social media feed looks awesome. Someone asks how much money you make or how sales on your project were, and you round up quite a bit. Or maybe you're similarly generous when you talk about your sexual conquests, or commensurately stingy with your weight.
Obviously this sort of deceit is not a good thing and we should all try to stop doing it. But what's interesting is how, when we compare ourselves to other people, we rarely stop to consider that they are probably lying too.
You think those Instagram influencers actually live like their photos look? You think it's not in their financial interest to make their career seem more lucrative and stable than it actually is? And yet, there we are, feeling envious or insecure. You think it's good business for your competitors to talk about how much trouble they're having lately? You think that artist or actor in the middle of a whirlwind press junket is going to admit that they're not happy? Or shoot down the wildly inflated rumors of how much they got paid?
Of course not! Marcus Aurelius talked about how even though we are all selfish people, we seem to care about other people's opinions more than our own. We know that we are prone to exaggeration and posturing, but we seem to have a blindspot for the fact that everyone else is doing this too.
(For more on why you should stop comparing yourself to others, watch this video!)
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