No One Is Excused From This | You’re Reading Books Wrong. Here’s A Better Way.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. No one is excused from this. It might seem a bit out of character for a powerful general, a fierce warrior, to go everywhere with a book tucked under their arm. But in ancient Rome this was the figure that the great Scipio Emilianus cut, who was known for training in philosophy as arduously as he trained at arms.

Flash forward to General James Mattis, a four star general in the Marines, who famously said that At no rank is a Marine excused from studying. In fact, he argued that it was essential that soldiers learned from the past, from the experiences of others, because the alternative was filling up body bags as they figured things out on their own. Reading is a form of magic, it is time travel, it is a way to steal a march on our enemies. Through it, through the pages of a book, we gain the wisdom that others earned quite painfully.

Through philosophy, as Seneca said, we can annex all the knowledge of the past into our own lives. Who would be so arrogant as to think they don't need to do that? Who would be so stupid as to want to learn by trial and error what they can learn from the trial and error of others? Books are literally manuals for living. They contain the wisdom of the collective human experience.

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