You Made That Up | Robert Greene's Favorite Stoic Lessons

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. You made that up. If you don't answer this call, you could lose your job. If you keep passing on these opportunities, you could get passed over in your career.

If you miss this flight, the vacation could be ruined. If you let your employees do that, they'll think you're a pushover. In the course of a day we make hundreds and thousands of assumptions. We rely on causal links. If this, then that, if not this, then that.

That, while rarely spelled out explicitly, they cause us worry and concern. The problem is most of this logic is spurious at best. Most of these assumptions are faulty. We're just making them up, even though they make us miserable. And this is why the use of reason as well as reflection was so important to the Stoics, because in pausing and examining, we find that much of our anxiety, much of our franticness, much of our suffering is self-inflicted and totally unnecessary.

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