Decide What to Be and Go Be It | How Would The Stoics Handle Social Media Envy?

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Decide what to be and go be it. In a way, it's easier to think about the greats as being made of superior stock, to think of Cato as coming from a long line of distinguished ancestors, to think of Marcus Aurelius as being someone who's naturally wise and decent. It lets us off the hook to think of virtue as something someone is born with, as something all or nothing.

But as we've talked about many times, Aristotle's insight was that this is nonsense. Virtue is no different than any other skill. You don't have it, you do it. And you get better at it the more you do it. If you want to be generous, if you want to be brave, if you want to be honest, if you want to be tough, if you want to be an early riser, it's not a complicated formula.

In fact, by wanting to be those things, you've already taken an important step. First say to yourself what you would be, Epictetus tells us, and then do what you have to do. The second part is harder but hardly complicated. You start tipping bigger, you start doing the stuff that scares you, stop dancing around your real opinions. You push yourself physically, you set your alarm.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (19 minutes, 3,683 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.