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

What are your panic rules? It's easy to know what you should do. It's easy to decide what you want to do.

The problem, as always, is that life gets in the way of these well-laid plans. Other people get in the way. Friction, apathy, inertia, indecision, all get in the way.

Less need, the General Manager of the Los Angeles Rams, explained to me on the Daily Stoic Podcast a while ago, that inside the Rams organization, they talk about having panic rules.

What do you do when everything gets mixed up when the other team calls an audible, when the coverage is confusing, when the play breaks down, and there's havoc on the field, and the play clock is running down, and the play call hasn't come in yet, because the headsets aren't working.

When there's chaos, and your brain is panicking, as Need said, go to your panic rules. Slow down and go to your panic rules.

This isn't just an on-the-field thing. As a GM, Sneed has to have panic rules too. When a player gets in trouble, when there's a controversy, when there's attempting high-risk, high-reward player, who hits the waiver wire, when somebody wants to renegotiate a contract, when he's being savaged in the press.

If you don't have panic rules, you're liable to make panic decisions. You're liable to do something emotional, something short-term, something that violates your principles, and hurts your cause.

Stoicism, in theory, is a philosophy. As a practice, it might also be seen as a set of panic rules.

Just that you do the right thing is an amazing, pithy, and prescient panic rule straight from the mouth of Marcus Aurelius. The rest doesn't matter, he concluded.

He's saying don't get distracted, don't overthink it. Don't be let astray. In a language of football, play to the whistle. Stick with your man, no, your assignment.

Remember, you always have the option of having no opinion. Another panic rule from Marcus' writings. Meaning that when things are crazy, you should step back. Wait until you've made up your mind before you say or do anything. Don't just add your judgment on top of things based on reflex.

If life was easy and perfect, we wouldn't need panic rules. But it isn't. Things are complicated. They go awry. We get mixed signals. We get overwhelmed.

And when that happens, we must always revert at once to our panic rules. The key is to make them really simple, so simple that we can't screw them up.

And then once we've gotten a hold of themselves and gotten through them, less might say we can huddle up, catch our breath, call the next play, and hopefully do better next time.

And look, I've got one of the Daily Stoke Challenge Coins. This is the Amorphati one. But the idea, I think even on these challenge coins is they're sort of a panic rule in brass, in your pocket, a reminder, hey, something happened. What's my basic principle? What is the most core thing that I believe don't want to forget? There it is.

So you can check those out, of course, as always, at store.dailysto.com. Don't mind me. I'm only dying slow. Let each thing you would do or say or intend, if you like that, of a dying person.

Marcus Aurelius is Meditations 2-11. And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoke 366 Meditations on Wisdom Perseverance in the Art of Living by yours truly.

My co-author and translator, Steve Enhancelman, you can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoke Store, over a million copies of the Daily Stoke in print now.

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