They Are Calling To You | Adam Grant’s 3 Skills for Real Growth

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. They are calling to you. It wasn't that long ago, it wasn't that far away. Greece and Rome are not a distant land from a foreign past. Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Epictetus and Zeno and Cleanthes are closer than you think, and not that different from you.

The world is young, Emerson said. The former great men and women call to us affectionately. In fact, Zeno got the same advice from the oracle at Delphi, who told him that the good life meant conversations with the dead, books, philosophy, even this podcast, it's a way to convene with them, a reminder that they dealt with the same problems we did, lived in the same world as us, In his amazing book, History Matters, we carried at the painted porch, David McCullough noted that there is no such thing as the dead past. The marvelous thing about the past is whenever you reach down into it, all you find is life.

The ancients are there to guide us, they give us their example as well as their explicit advice, Seneca's letters or Marcus Aurelius's meditations. We had their speeches, we can watch their plays, we can look up at their statues we can struggle to live up to their expectations, we can learn from their mistakes. It wasn't that long ago that they lived, you know, and closer to us in some cases than they were to the pyramids of ancient Egypt. So why do we act like they're out of reach?

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