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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a

meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life.

And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful.

With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives.

But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

Don't be satisfied with this.

You bought meditations and you skimmed it. You read the summary of antifragil or essentialism on one of those business sites.

You've seen a couple of TED talks on evolutionary biology and psychology. You're following politics through a couple of people on Twitter.

So you've got it, right? You're informed? No.

Even as an old man, Marcus Aurelius was chiding himself not to be satisfied with just getting the gist of things. Instead, he knew he had to read attentively.

He told himself he needed to go directly to the seat of knowledge and he continued to seek out tutors and mentors.

He lingered, as Seneca said, on a small number of master thinkers reading and rereading their work until he'd gone way beyond just getting the gist.

The wisdom of the Stokes did not come easily. Today in the modern world, understanding is even tougher, delusional as we are with misinformation, partisanship, distractions, and infinitely more complexity.

So you can't settle. You have to really work for it, really work for it. And that starts right now.

Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. My guest today is not just one of my favorite people, one of my favorite authors.

Not just someone who gave me a ton of great advice when I was writing Ego as the enemy and not just someone who is a great thinker, but someone who I think now with this episode holds the record for the most appearances on the Daily Stoke Podcast even more than the great Robert Green.

Talking about Cal Newport, his new book, A World Without Email, reimagining work in an age of communication overload is great, very timely, like all Cal's books give me a ton to chew on.

We talk about that in the episode, but as as always seems to go with Cal, we get way into what I think is the pressing question for me and for most of us in this modern world, which is how do we become the best at what it is that we do?

And most of us perform some form of knowledge work, right? Knowledge work is when you're using your mind, when you're creating something, making something when you're leading in some way.

And Cal, like a great performance psychologist, I had Michael Jervé on the podcast recently. I think Cal is the equivalent of that in this knowledge work space.

How do you get better at making decisions? How do you get better at managing your productivity? How do you get better at concentrating? How do you get better at eliminating distractions? How do you get better at setting up systems?

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