Who Decides Who Gets What? | What Young Men Get Wrong About Stoicism

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, 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. Who decides who gets what? You went to school. You worked hard. You sacrificed. You got really good at what you do. That's what they pay you for. Right? That's why they recruited you. That's why they put you in charge. You earned it. And yet despite this success, this track record, this leverage you have, your life is so backwards. In one of his letters, Seneca tells a story about Alexander the Great, then on the verge of conquering another distant land. The rulers of that country came to him and offered him some of their territory if he ceased his attack. Alexander, Seneca tells us, quietly corrected them, saying that he hadn't come to Asia with the intention of accepting whatever they cared to give him, but of letting them keep whatever he chose to leave them. And so it ought to go for our time and priorities, Seneca continued. Philosophy, likewise, tells all other occupations, he wrote. It is not my intention to accept whatever time is left over for you. You shall have instead, he says, what I regret. Philosophy should not get the leftovers, or as we said in a daily dad email and podcast about the same idea, neither should your family. It should not be relegated to the scraps of time between other obligations. It is not some frivolous hobby. It is the key to everything we are trying to do. It's a compass, a guiding light. It's what we owe our ultimate devotion. So as you look at your day, as you look at your life, make sure that you are prioritizing properly. Make sure that you are giving your best, your most productive hours to the most important things, because you're not really successful if success doesn't allow you to do that. You don't really have leverage if you have to give the best of yourself away to things that don't matter. You're not really in charge if you can't say, my work on myself comes first. You shall get what's left over. One of the things I try to do towards the end, dear, 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 …