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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 Markis 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.

Make A's and a few things. Just like ours, the ancient world was filled with people who had ambitious goals and trouble prioritizing them. Seneca said it's one of the hardest balances to strike in life.

We don't want to be the person who can never sit still. For love of bustle is not industry, he said it is only the restlessness of a hunted mind.

But we also don't want to be the person always sitting still. True repose doesn't consist in condemning all emotion as merely vexation, he wrote.

That kind of repose is slackness and inertia. The work of the philosopher, Seneca said, is finding the perfect balance of those two tendencies.

It's about working and relaxing, not working, and work of audience. When I had the great Matthew McConaughey on the Daily Podcast last year, he told us the story of how he found that balance himself.

At one point a few years ago, McConaughey realized that he was doing too much. He had a production company, a music label, a foundation, his acting career, his family.

The problem wasn't that he couldn't juggle at all. The problem was that he was making bees and five things instead of making aes and three things.

He called his lawyer and shut it down, the production company and the music label. It wasn't an easy production to make and he had to carefully unwind the businesses to be fair to the people who had been working hard on them.

But it was the right call for him and his family. The incredible work he's done as an actor since and now his book Greenlights, it's a testament to that.

And as Marcus Aurelius said, when you eliminate the essential, you get the double benefit of doing the essential stuff better.

Which is why we all regularly need to do the following. Make a list of the things you're trying to juggle, pair it down to a few.

Commit to making aes and those few things instead of bees and seas and a lot of things, do you commit from what you never should have committed to in the first place?

Dedicate yourself to what's actually essential and those five steps are the pathways to balance and success.

A selfish reason to be good. The person who does wrong does wrong to themselves. The unjust person is unjust to themselves, making themselves evil.

That's Marcus Aurelius' meditation, 9-4. The next time you do something wrong, try to remember how it made you feel. Rarely do we find ourselves saying, man, I feel great.

And there's a reason that there's often vomit at crime scenes. Instead of the catharsis, the person thought they'd feel when they let themselves get out of control or when they got their revenge, they end up making themselves sick.

And we feel a lighter version of this when we lie, when we cheat, when we screw someone over.

So in that split second before your ill-gotten gains kick in, ask yourself, how do I feel about myself?

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