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Saturday, December 23, 2023
Your Saturday Stoic Review — Week of December 18 - 24
Progress, Epictetus said, is made only by overcoming difficulty. "So when trouble comes, think of yourself as a wrestler whom God, like a trainer, has paired with a tough young buck. For what purpose? To turn you into Olympic-class material. That's why we created the Daily Stoic New Year New You challenge. It's 21 days of challenges—presented one per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy—designed to turn you into Olympic-class material.
Each day you'll get an email from us with instructions for the day's challenge. These will all be exercises and routines you can begin right away to spark personal reinvention. We'll tell you what to do, how to do it, and why it works. We'll give you strategies for maintaining this way of living, not just for this challenge or for this coming year, but for your whole life.
Seneca would say that he actually pitied people who have never experienced challenges. "You have passed through life without an opponent," he said, "No one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you." Epictetus said when a challenge is put in front of you, think of yourself as an athlete getting paired with a tough competitor. You want to be Olympic-class? "This is going to take some sweat to accomplish," he said.
In a recent video on the Daily Stoic YouTube Channel, Ryan Holiday shares some Stoic habits to practice in 2024. Epictetus said that habits, good or bad, were like a bonfire — every time we perform a habit, we reinforce it, we fuel the fire. If we want to be better, if we want to thrive, we need to cultivate good habits, like adapting to change this new year:
"In one of the beautiful passages in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius reminds himself that everything in life comes from change, good or bad. And by trying to keep things the same not only are you focused on something that you don't control, but you're preventing yourself from all the wonderful opportunities that could come your way… All you can focus on this year is embracing those things, adapting yourself, and acquiescing to change, rather than fighting it, fearing it, resenting it. It's going to happen regardless of how you feel about it — what you should focus on, the Stoics would say, is what you're going to do about it.
In a recent episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan Holiday speaks with author Shane Parrish about his new book, Clear Thinking, the true marks of wisdom and virtue, the difference between positioning and preparation, and a timeless truth:
"It's been true since even before the Stoics: we are products of our environment. Our environment influences us in so many different ways. We tend to think of environment as physical, like the coal piece from Epictetus. But it's also our mental environment. It's who we hang around. It's so many different things that we don't think about. And so part of the book is, how do we shape our environment to make our desired behaviors our default behaviors?
As Shane Parrish put it, it's up to us to shape our environment so that our desired behaviors become our default behaviors. That's what the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge is all about…
These aren't pie-in-the-sky, theoretical discussions but clear, immediate exercises and methods you can begin right now to start sowing the seeds for the life you want. We'll tell you what to do, how to do it, and why it works.
Through 21 brand new challenges delivery daily, you will:
✓ Learn to stop procrastinating and avoiding the change you truly desire ✓ Build new habits that form a strong foundation for change ✓ Abandon the harmful habits that are dragging you down ✓ Strengthen your character, becoming a more virtuous version of yourself
And above all: You will find out just how much you are capable of.
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