Tie Yourself to the Mast | Ask Daily Stoic

The Daily Stoic

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Education, 694393, Daily Stoic, Society & Culture, Stoic, Stoicism, Self-improvement, Business, Stoic Philosophy, Philosophy, Ryan Holiday

4.6 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’d be wonderful if we always did what we know we want or need to do. But that’s not how the world is. It is filled with temptations, distractions, and forces tugging us toward the rocks.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation
0:11.7	designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life.
0:18.8	Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of
0:24.2	history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example,
0:33.0	and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom.
0:40.3	For more, visit Dailystoic.com.
1:00.5	It's one of the most critical and dangerous moments in perhaps the greatest story ever told.
1:07.2	Odysseus ties himself to the mast of his ship because it's the only way to resist steering towards the beautiful sound of the sirens. It's an ingenious little trick that makes him the first person to ever hear the sirens and live to tell the tale,
1:17.7	to avoid fatally crashing into the rocks where countless ships lay wrecked their sailors lured to their deaths by a temptation they could not control.
1:29.2	On an episode of the Daily Stoic podcast, the behavioral scientist Katie Milkman talked about this is being the original
1:34.8	example of what they call in behavioral science a commitment device, a way of deliberately
1:41.2	constraining ourselves to help us achieve our goals.
1:45.3	It's talked about in every behavioral science book and every behavioral science class, she explained,
1:50.5	because we think of it as the original example of someone facing temptation
1:54.7	and coming up with a clever workaround to prevent giving in.
1:59.5	Every sailor knew that the sirens were deadly. Every captain
2:03.2	warned his crew about those beautiful voices that lured their ships to destruction. They all knew
2:09.9	that following the sound meant death. That knowledge should have been enough, but it wasn't. Ship after
2:16.9	ship crashed, sailor after sailor couldn't help themselves.
2:21.3	What made Odysseus different wasn't that he had more willpower or discipline than the other
2:26.1	captains, was that he was wise enough to know that he didn't.
2:30.1	He understood that in those moment, with those beautiful voices calling, he'd be just as weak as
	...

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