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Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty not just reading our daily meditation,

but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoke,

365 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,

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

You don't have to do this anymore. In one of the most vulnerable scenes in the Taylor Swift documentary on Netflix,

Swift talks about how she feels while looking at a paparazzi photo of herself.

Her lifelong habit, she says, is to see what's wrong with her appearance, to instinctively see that she needs to lose weight,

to start monitoring what she eats more closely and quite possibly stop eating altogether.

But then she stops herself as she lingers on the photo, drawn as she is toward that well-worn habit and says, no, we don't do that anymore.

I know where this leads, she says, and I'm not interested in going there.

It's a remarkable moment because you're getting to see the power of self-talk and look into the process of someone who has put real work at breaking a destructive pattern.

In Meditations, Marcus really talks about discarding his anxiety because he knows that it's within him.

It's not something that's done to him. Anxiety is something that he does to himself, which means he can stop it too.

I don't have to do this anymore. He's saying, I'm stopping right now.

In fact, what's so unique about his book Meditations is those scenes of self-dialogue where Marcus is convincing himself to get out of bed in the morning,

to not be frustrated by frustrating people, to not feel sorry for himself because something bad happened, to not be afraid of death even as his health fades.

You should know that whatever destructive patterns you're in, reaching for a bottle when you're feeling worthless, losing your temper, procrastinating, overusing your phone, struggling with food issues, you have the power to have the conversation that Swift is having that Marcus had.

You can say, no, I don't do that anymore because you know where it leads and you're not going to go there.

It's not an easy conversation to have, but it may well save your life, so identify what needs to be said and insist on saying it.

On being invincible, who then is invincible, the one who cannot be upset by anything outside their reasoned choice? That's epictetus, discourses. 1.18.

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