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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to day four of the lock in. And today's topic, again by Epithetus in one of his lectures, is on progress. It's about progress. So he's basically saying to his students in his lecture, listen, boys, listen, and girls.
Speaker 1:We can agree progress is understanding what's in our control and what's not in our control. That's a good start. We can we can we can agree that progress isn't just about reading for the sake of reading. It's like how are you applying these things? Are you understanding what was in your control day to day and what's not?
Speaker 1:Because if you're not, you've already lost. And then he's saying it's like he says here, say you were to say to an athlete, And he says, say if I were to say to an athlete, show me your shoulders. And the athlete responded with, have a look at my weights. And petite says, get out of here with you and your gigantic weights. What I wanna see isn't the weights, but how you've profited from using them.
Speaker 1:Okay? And then he says, take the book, the the the take the popular book on impulse. This could be any modern book. Take the popular book on impulse and see how well I've read it. Okay.
Speaker 1:This is what someone says to him. Idiot, it's not that that I'm after that you've read it. I want to know how you put impulse and repulsion into practice and desire and avoid this as well. I want to know how you apply and prepare yourself and how you practice attention so that I can decide whether with you these functions operate in harmony with nature. Okay, so it's all about listen.
Speaker 1:It's all about building your character and the sun is I don't it doesn't matter how much you read, how much you think you know, are you applying stuff? And it's the same with a challenge like, you can know many, many things about health and fitness. You can know many, many things, but you see application and the fundamentals are matter. Are you making progress in the fundamentals? If not, what are you doing?
Speaker 1:Do you know what mean? Are you read more? You can listen to more podcasts and radio. Have you walked? Are you starting to walk more?
Speaker 1:If not, hey, are you starting to look after your nutrition more? Are you understanding the mindsets that don't serve you? And are you falling into catastrophization traps? Again, you're doing all of this self work, but is it actually working? Is the question.
Speaker 1:And he's talking about as well, like, you know, how do you expect a fruit to ripen overnight? You know, how stupid will that be? Expect a fruit to ripen overnight? No, you have to give it time, attention and let it go through the seasons and everything. How can you expect your progress also to be instantaneous?
Speaker 1:He's talking about everything in nature follows the follows the flow that it takes time, it takes some nurturing, it takes the right conditions, and then the right time to come. And the same with the farmer and the seed, you know, farmer reaping and expecting to sow the next day. You'd be thinking you'd go to a mental asylum. It wasn't how it works, buddy. Do you know I mean?
Speaker 1:It's not how it works at all. I don't know why you think it works this way, but it's never worked this way. Never ever worked this way. So what however you've got this in your head, nah, it doesn't work that way. Okay?
Speaker 1:So he talks as well about just because you can't be the best at something shouldn't stop you trying to improve. Okay. So like, it's important that he said he says stuff like, does every horse become a stallion? You know, does every dog become a greyhound? Does every human become an athlete?
Speaker 1:Does every person become famous and rich? You know, all these things that we compare ourselves to and it's like we well, I want that person's money, that person's looks, that person's athleticism, that person's, you know, energy. How are you making progress this way? You're comparing yourself to what you perceive as the best of all of these people, And then you start comparing yourself to that. And then you feel worse.
Speaker 1:Well, I can't be any of this. You know? One rule is if you compare yourself with someone, you must also be prepared to swap everything about your life for that person. You can't cherry pick. I'd like someone's I'd like their I don't know, their looks or their body shape.
Speaker 1:Alright. Well, you want their body shape and you want their looks, you have to have their life as well. Maybe they are not happy at work. Maybe they're in a bad relationship. Maybe they suffer with other problems.
Speaker 1:You know, you can't just pick and choose like this. This is why when it comes to progress, and it's always not about perfection, no great thing is made suddenly ever. And you're not gonna fit things that you're not gonna change overnight, but you can change your direction overnight. Okay? And it's important that even comparing yourself to yesterday, you know, that's another famous thing people say, compare yourself to yesterday, one percent every day.
Speaker 1:I think it's just like not even trying to be better all the time every day because every each day we'll have a different challenge or at least sometimes nothing, and nothing much happens for weeks and something happens, you know. Just from today until bedtime, the progress is determined on if you've lived the day in line with who you want to be. Okay? Not like better than yesterday. You can't be better than who you want to be yesterday if you did if you are who you want to be yesterday.
Speaker 1:Does that make sense? There's no like progress bar on this. And then you say to yourself, okay, if I am being the person I want to be day in, day out, inevitably this person becomes healthier, happier, perhaps your goal means it will be richer, or different job, better relationship. This is the side effect of it, you know? And I think that's the key thing.
Speaker 1:It's like, are your values? What type of person do you want to be? And were you that person today? Or are you going to be that person today until bedtime? That's all you gotta do.
Speaker 1:I don't I'm not saying do it. I'm not thinking do it for the next three weeks. I'm just thinking, can you do it today? Because when you go to sleep, you have a reboot and you go again tomorrow. When you start thinking I gotta do this for three weeks, you're already like tiring yourself out.
Speaker 1:I can't do this for three weeks. But remember, when you get to the end of the day, and you start thinking, my God, this is so hard and all, I'm stressing on. How, you know, how often does a good sleep sort your mindset out? You know, you might have problems and ask her to sleep, wake up, and you solve problems, you think better. So sleep, this sleep reset is one of the most important parts.
Speaker 1:If you don't have a good sleep reset, then maybe things do sleep to the next day. But if you have a good sleep reset and make sure you are doing the good things for your sleep, make sure you're going to bed earlier. Make sure you're not on your phone all night. You know these things that put your phone away is one of them. Can have better sleep and you can have a better chance tomorrow to be the person you want to be.
Speaker 1:Because we do have a finite amount of cognitive load. It's a fact. Like, we talk about, can you have more willpower? Your willpower isn't really that much anyway. So it's not really about fighting things all the time.
Speaker 1:And when we get tired, and towards the end of the day is, for example, and your willpower is being used throughout the day, you're likely going to lose out. And being tired means, oh, tired, just want to snack. And that's why snacking, in the research, snacking calories come later in day and the night because, you know, usually tired, willpower is gone, and we don't have anything to rely on. But willpower is going to be relied on anyway. Willpower comes in when you have to fight something.
Speaker 1:The less fighting you do day to day psychologically, the better. You know? Understanding, being aware of what happens internally without fighting it will be a big win for you. Like making progress could be today. I'm just going to be aware of when I have cravings today, and I'm going to write them down.
Speaker 1:And I'm going to write down exactly what triggered it from start to finish and what my mind is saying. And you'll find usually again, like I mentioned, you smell the nice food. Someone mentioned something that brings happiness or sadness. You're bored and you need something pleasurable to kind of plug the gap. He's not thinking, well, I visualize me eating a cake or me eating this and it makes me feel happy and then you eat, then you get momentary pleasure for five seconds and then it's gone and it doesn't actually fill that gap.
Speaker 1:And then, you know, Donald Robertson says this, and he's a stoicism expert and psychologist, people often mistake pleasure for happiness, very often. You know, you eat it for pleasure, does that necessarily make you content and happy? And also fleeting emotion. Can you rely on fleeting emotions to be something that you want to work on? Not really.
Speaker 1:Like, okay, you know, there's there's people over history that say pleasure is the ultimate goal of life, but you just are not hedonic treadmill. It keeps going. It keeps going, going, going, going, going, and you eventually realize it's not. And sometimes you realize actually is the goal of life to be happy every day? Like is that even a reasonable thing to think about?
Speaker 1:Like, is that just being a bit entitled as human beings? Oh, yes, we've developed this world and we can talk and we can open up our feelings. But never in human history is being happy being the fundamental thing. Know, if you think about most of human history, it's been danger, survival, working with your team, with your tribe or whatever it was. But really, they weren't thinking, am I happy right now?
Speaker 1:We're thinking, say, maybe they were thinking about some time with some kind of security. Maybe they were thinking about team cohesion. Maybe they're thinking about, you know. What else would they be thinking about if you were to go back? You know, while they were saying, are we happy doing this?
Speaker 1:It's like, we don't have a choice doing this, buddy. Like, we're on the savannahs. Yeah. We need to go and yeah. It's down to look or whatever.
Speaker 1:There's a massive bison. It's time to get him. Yeah. I'm not happy running after that, though. Well, some things you can't escape from.
Speaker 1:Do you what I mean? It's like, some things are fucked. Some things you have to do things. Yeah. Maybe you're not happy about it, but it's just something that we do or we have to do.
Speaker 1:And I think there's a mix of it, you know, there is a mix that don't expect to have days when you feel happy every day. That's maybe the wrong metric. I think it's days you feel like that the character you want to be, the person you want to live up to is there essentially. Because you could lose it, for example, you could say, if I think every day I need to be happy, then anything bad happens is bad. No.
Speaker 1:Obviously, that's a bad day for you. But if you think, well, for me as a term of character, I'm gonna for me to be fulfilled, maybe fulfillment or eudaimonia is what the ancient Greeks would say. Eudaimonia, like some form of fulfillment, doesn't come from just being happy. If you just wanna be happy and safe and pleasurable, can go to a corner of a room, you can eat all the cake you want, you can watch all the TV shows you want, you love, but all the music you love you want, never leave the outside world, you know, there we are, you'll be fine. But really, we're after adventure more than anything.
Speaker 1:We a life that we're proud of. We want some kind of adventure in the world day to day. We want to be attaining some form of character because we always when you think about it, if you look up to other people, it's always like you look up to their kind of courage or something. As examples, I looked up that person's courage. Do we look up to people's happiness or do we look at their character?
Speaker 1:And their character means that, yeah, they're content with themselves for sure, but their fulfillment or eudaimonia comes from courage, living with wisdom, doing the right thing, you know, and temperance, moderation. These things combined is what the ancient world, starting with Socrates, say. Combine those four virtues, the cardinal virtues, and you're probably gonna be living feeling some form of or you'd be living like a life of eudaimonia. Because happiness potentially is fleeting feeling up and down, pleasure, feeling fulfilled with who you're becoming and taking the hits all along the way and not expecting every day to be easy. But, you know, you're going to turn up every day and be the person you want to be.
Speaker 1:That is I think that's it. That's what we should strive for. Not an easy life. For things to change, you gotta change. Don't wish it was easier.
Speaker 1:Wish you were better. Classic gym room. I'll leave you that, guys. Have a good day. Speak soon.