This Is a Very Important Conversation You’re A Part Of | Jaimie Alexander’s Daily Stoic Practice

Ryan Holiday (0:00)

Welcome to The Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

Around 2,300 years ago, a man stood on a porch in Athens and started a conversation. His name was Zeno. The porch was the stoic pochile, the painted porch. The conversation was about how to live, what matters, what do we owe each other, how do we become better people?

Cleanthes and Chrysippus carried this conversation forward. Diogenes brought it to Rome. Seneca explored these questions in letters to a friend. Epictetus discussed them with his students. Marcus Aurelius took them up in his private journal, quoting earlier thinkers wrestling with their ideas, bringing them to bear in his own life. Between them and after them were generations and generations of Stoics, reading, talking about, translating, publishing those works.

Montaigne picked up the conversation in his essays. Elizabeth Carter translated Epictetus into English. Thomas Wentworth Higginson brought out an edition for American readers. Stockdale was introduced to it at Stanford.

Years later, Steve Hanselman, my co-writer on The Daily Stoic, encountered Higginson's Epictetus while studying at Harvard Divinity School. That book led him into Stoicism, and eventually we collaborate on this book that became The Daily Stoic, and maybe that's how you were introduced to Stoicism. That's how this conversation goes and is going. Someone reads something, they think about it, they share it, they help another person see something that they missed. Ten years ago now, we added our own contribution to that conversation when we published The Daily Stoic. The idea of one page a day of Stoic philosophy. But the conversation didn't stop there, right? I studied and wrote about and thought about and read about the Stoics in the intervening decade. And so I just had this recent chance to go back through the book and make it better. And that's what we're calling The Daily Stoic 10th anniversary edition. It's got new quotes. It's got new stories. It's got new meditations. I think it's a much better book. There are more voices in it now, more ideas, more context, more of the ideas that Steve and I have learned since we first put it together. Now, the words of the Stoics themselves haven't changed, but what matters is what they mean. The world around us has changed. And you have changed too. You have become a part of this. When you've emailed me, when you've underlined a passage, when you've shared it, when you've highlighted something. And so that conversation that began on a porch in Athens 2,300 years later is still going strong. And that's amazing. And that's lovely. And it's been such an incredible privilege to be a part of it. And I want to keep it going. And I have no plans to stop. You can grab the 10th anniversary edition of The Daily Stoic, signed and numbered first editions at dailystoic.com/ds10. You can also grab the new Leather Bound edition, which is really, really cool. Hopefully that'll last you the next 10 years. All of that at dailystoic.com/ds10.

I read somewhere that you read a Stoic passage every day.

Jaimie Alexander (3:32)

Okay, I do. I actually brought my Daily Stoic book because whether you like it or not, you're going to sign it.

So I used to have meditations and I would read that and I would, sometimes I don't have a ton of time to sit and meditate on it. So what I love that you've done is you've brought this ancient philosophy and you have made it so much more digestible for the modern person. These teachings, honestly, they were popular at some points in history, right? Like repeatedly, but in all honesty, when I mentioned Stoicism, a lot of people are like, what's that? Like you're Stoic, like you're strong, you stand up tall and you're like, not quite. And so when I start to talk about it, they're always like, wow, I mean, yeah, I've thought that way or I felt that way. And so I recommend your book because I say, look, not only are you just getting Marcus Aurelius, you're getting Epictetus, you're getting Seneca, you're getting all these different avenues of Stoicism, of the philosophy, and you're getting somebody who is alive right now that's putting it out there in real time. So that if you say, if you read a text and you're like, hmm, I'm not quite sure what that means, it's like, you know what, here's an interpretation at the bottom of the page. Does that give you something to think about? And so what I do is every morning, I wake up, this is part of my morning routine to keep my head screwed on straight. I wake up, I write a gratitude list that's half a page.