Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today.

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 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, Santa Cah,

and some analysis for me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

This is the secret to real wealth. What is the point of reading? To me, Fran Lieboit's tells Martin Scorsese and his new documentary, Pretend It's a City,

reading is just a way of being immensely rich. This may be the reason I never cared about money, she said,

because as soon as you can read, you are already incredibly rich. It's true. There are, of course, rich people who don't read, but like Harry Truman's famous quote,

there are very few people who read who are not rich, be it in wisdom, imagination, or happiness. Although it's also true that books are pretty much the single best investment a person can make,

which is why most people who are financially successful are readers. As Santa Cah said,

to read is to annex all the ages of the past into your own. To study philosophy is to acquire the thing which plenty of kings and titans have never had,

and understanding of what the good life is like. So why do we read? Because it's fun, because it's part of philosophy,

because it gives us one of the best forms of relaxation. It lets us communicate with the greatest minds to ever live. It lets us be friends with them too. It gives us answers to our problems.

Reading makes us rich in more ways than one.

Impossible without your consent. This is today's entry from the Daily Stoic.

Today I escaped from the crush of circumstances, or better put, I threw them out for the crush wasn't from outside me, but in my own assumptions.

Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 9-13.

On tough days we might say my work is overwhelming, or my boss is really frustrating. If only we could understand that this is impossible.

Someone can't frustrate you, work can't overwhelm you. These are external objects, and they have no access to your mind. Those emotions you feel as real as they are,

they come from the inside, not from the outside. The Stoic use the word hypolepsis, which means a taking up of perceptions of thoughts and judgments by our mind.

What we assume, what we willingly generate in our mind, that's on us. We can't blame other people for making us feel stressed or frustrating us.

...