You Are Not Fixed | How A Stoic Would Respond To A Tyrant

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. We all have bad habits. Some of us procrastinate. Nearly all of us, as Seneca said, are slaves to something, food or sex or booze or ambition. We don't work as hard as we should, or we work too hard and too quick with our temper or we're too slow to ask for help.

The point is we're not what we could be. And in some cases, we're quite messed up. Indeed, we are all quite flawed. On an episode of the Daily Stoic podcast with Tim Urban, he's the creator of Wait but Why, and he's the author of this book called What's Our Problem, I talked to Tim about his lifelong struggle with some of these very habits, namely, distraction and procrastination.

And Tim was quite aware about how his weaknesses in these areas have made things harder for him over the years, but he also expressed a sincere belief in his ability to change and grow. In other words, he was broken but not fixed. He retains, despite this discouragement, a growth mindset, He refuses to relinquish what the Stoics believed was our ultimate power, our sense of agency over our own thoughts, our emotions, and our responses to life. You know, it's easy to be cynical about ourselves.

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