Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast.

Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories

from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do.

And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic

intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave

you with, to journal about whatever it is you happen to be doing.

So let's get into it.

The Stoics were all about routine and repetition.

They talked about fueling the habit bonfire.

They would have agreed with Aristotle.

We are what we repeatedly do.

We become what we repeatedly study and focus on.

Epic-Tius in fact said just that.

You become what you give your attention to, he said.

If you yourself don't choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone

else will.

Santa could say that to study philosophy was to annex the past into our own time.

He talked about repeatedly immersing yourself in the great text of history.

You must linger under a small number of master thinkers and digest their works, he said,

if you would derive ideas, which shall win firmhold in your mind.

Marcus Aurelius for his part shows us in meditations that for all the matters of state that fell before

him, all the people and places that he had to know and work with, what he spent the most

...