Do This While You Can | The Portable Retreat
The Daily Stoic
Daily Stoic | Backyard Ventures
4.5 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 18 March 2024
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s funny, over here at Daily Stoic, we do these challenges throughout the year (maybe you’ve joined one before). On the one hand, this name is probably bad marketing. People don’t usually get excited by the thought of being challenged. In fact, what they usually want is a secret or a shortcut or a hack. They want someone to solve the challenges for them. On the other hand, isn’t embracing life’s challenges what Stoicism is all about? So naturally, we couldn’t call the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge anything but that. It is a challenge. 10 days straight of them. Starting now.
So yes it’s been a long December, but as the song also reminds us, there’s reason to believe that this year will be better than the last. And that reason is you—if you allow yourself to be, if you challenge yourself, if you decide to climb out of your velvet rut. A person who has never been challenged, Seneca said, who always gets their way, is a tragic figure. They have no idea what they are capable of. They are not even close to fulfilling their potential. “Stop wandering about!” Marcus Aurelius said to himself, perhaps on the eve of a new season just like this one. “Get busy with life's purpose,” he commanded, “toss aside empty hopes, get active in your own rescue–if you care for yourself at all—and do it while you can.”
And so as the seasons change, as the clocks change, we want to urge you one last time to join us and thousands of other Stoics in The Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. Because one of the best ways to cure anxiety, to deal with stress, and to become present is to really throw yourself into some means of self-improvement. Stop procrastinating. Break out. Break free. Get cleaning. Challenge yourself.
✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail
🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.
📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, |
| 0:09.8 | illustrated with stories from history, current events and literature to help you be better at what you do. |
| 0:15.0 | And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, |
| 0:22.5 | something to think on, |
| 0:24.1 | something to leave you with, to journal about |
| 0:26.4 | whatever it is you happen to be doing. |
| 0:28.7 | So let's get into it. |
| 0:35.0 | This is how to break out and break free. |
| 0:39.0 | It's very easy to get comfortable |
| 0:42.0 | to build up your life exactly how you want it to be, to |
| 0:46.6 | minimize inconveniences and hand off the stuff you don't like to do, to find what |
| 0:50.5 | you enjoy, where you enjoy it and never leave. |
| 0:53.6 | A velvet rut is what this is called. |
| 0:56.2 | It's nice, but the comfort tricks you into thinking that you're not stuck. |
| 1:00.0 | And look after a pandemic, after a period of inflation, bad news, constantly screaming at you from your TV or timeline after months of harsh winter, |
| 1:08.8 | it's hard not to seek out that comfort, to be relieved by it. It's been a long December as the song goes and there's plenty of reason to |
| 1:17.3 | crawl into a velvet rut with a blanket or to jet off somewhere warm and radiate in luxury. |
| 1:23.6 | But the Stellics knew that this was a kind of death, |
| 1:26.4 | that as soon as we stopped growing, we start dying, |
| 1:29.4 | or at least we become more vulnerable |
| 1:31.2 | to the swings of fate and fortune. |
| 1:33.7 | Seneca talked over and over again about the importance of adversity of not only |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Daily Stoic | Backyard Ventures, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Daily Stoic | Backyard Ventures and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.