Are You “Well-Read” in This Sense?

One of the things I try to do towards the end of the year, it's something my parents taught me, is, like, things slow down, you finally can think about things for a minute. I wanna pick something or someone to be consciously generous to. When we're out we're traveling on Christmas day, I love to tip big. But one of the things I love to do with my family is we pull up GiveWell, and we find a highly effective charity, and we donate money to it. Right? Sometimes when you're doing charitable donations, like, does it help? Does it make a difference? You donate to this fund or that fund. But one of the things that's so empowering about GiveWell is they put a number on the effectiveness. Right? You know that it's making a difference, which is why over a 150,000 donors have already trusted GiveWell to give more than 2 and a half billion dollars, and rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save over 300,000 lives and improve the lives of millions more, which is why when I'm thinking about making a charitable donation, I check GiveWell first. You can find all their research and recommendations on their site for free. And thanks to the donors that sponsor that research, GiveWell doesn't take a cut of your tax deductible donation when you give it to one of the recommended funds. This is your first gift through GiveWell. You can have your donation matched up to $100 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. And to claim your match, you just go to givewell.org and pick podcast, and enter The Daily Stoic at checkout. Make sure they know you heard about GiveWell from The Daily Stoic to get your donation matched. Givewell.org. Code The Daily Stoic to donate or find out more. Welcome to the daily stoic podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000 year old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com. This is what it means to be well read. Have you noticed in Marcus Aurelius' Meditations that he quotes other writers dozens and dozens of times without explicitly stating who he is quoting? Presumably, considering he wrote most of Meditations in a tent on the battlefield, He didn't have his copies beside him when he was quoting Socrates, or Epictetus, or Homer, or Plato. No. He was transcribing these quotes straight from memory. And this capacity for recall is indicative of the ancients' approach to reading. The philosopher Mortimer Adler talked about how the phrase well read has gotten somewhat distorted in recent …