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Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation,

but also reading a passage from the book, The Daily Stoic, 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Steve Enhancelman.

And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epititus Marcus Relius, Seneca, then some analysis for me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

Just keep hammering away. There's something delightfully simple about Ulysses S. Grant. Napoleon seems like some sort of larger than life figure, a peerless genius, like the freak athletes we see on television.

The same for the incredible heroism of an Admiral Stockdale. Their accomplishments are impressive, but not exactly relatable.

Grant, on the other hand, is more like us, not just because he struggled in life, or because he was uninterested in pomp or circumstance, but because his theory of war was so simple that even a grunt could understand it.

As the brilliant historian, S. C. Gwyn writes in hymns of the Republic, Grant's main approach was to punch the enemy in the gut, and then afterward worry about what the enemy had been planning to do to him.

In temporary said that Grant was like the mythological thore, he just kept hammering away at problems until they fell. He did not stop Gwyn writes. He would not be deterred. He came directly at you and smashed into you again and again until you were beaten, and then persisted beyond that to the non-existent terms of your surrender.

It was simple, but it worked. What's better is that it still works in war and life. Marcus Aurelius said, we solve our problems action by action, step by step. He said, we can't get deterred just because they are hard or because they are hard for us.

If it's humanly possible to do it, he said, then commit to doing it and know that you can do it. Cato, like Grant, had that same kind of determination. The only way you could beat him was to break him, and you were not going to break him, which was clear from boyhood on when a bully tried to intimidate him by dangling Cato off a balcony, and all he got in response was silence and a stare that gave him the chills.

You could all use a little bit of that in our lives. Cleanse your jaw, sit down or stand up and get to work. Don't get excited, don't get discouraged, just keep hammering away. That's how you win, a war, and win at life. You solve most problems by beating them into submission. You crush resistance. You cannot be deterred and you cannot stop. If you can do that, then nothing can beat you.

The color of your thoughts. This is the Daily Stoke entry for April 1st. Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought for the human spirit is colored by such impressions. Marcus Arelius' meditations, 516.

If you bend your body into a sitting position every day for a long enough period of time, the curvature of your spine changes, a doctor can tell from a radiograph or an autopsy whether someone sat at a desk for a living.

If you shove your feet into tiny narrow dress shoes each day, your feet will begin to take on that form as well. And the same is true for our mind.

If you hold a perpetually negative outlook soon enough, everything you encounter will seem negative. Close it off and you will become close-minded.

Color it with the wrong thoughts and your life will be died the same.

I wanted to show Gregory Hayes' translation in that same quote. I think you guys will like it. He says it interesting too.

He says, the things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts. Color it with a run of thoughts like this. He says, anywhere you lead your life, you can lead a good one.

But lives are let at court. Then good ones can be. Things gravitate toward what they were intended for. What things gravitate towards is their goal.

The things goal is what benefits it. It's good. Irrational beings good is unselfishness. What were we born for? That's nothing new. Remember, lower things for the sake of higher ones and higher ones for one another.

Things that have a consciousness are higher than things that don't. And those with the logos still higher.

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