Trudging Through Your Own Life? Here's the Stoic Fix | Maria Semple
4/17/202654 min
How to do your best work, reframe life's bullshit, and stop making your happiness hostage to outcomes.
Maria Semple is the bestselling author of Today Will Be Different, Where'd You Go, Bernadette, and This One Is Mine. Before writing fiction, Maria wrote for TV. Her newest book is called Go Gentle.
In this episode we talk about:
- Cognitive reframing tools to shift your mindset
- Maria's daily Stoic routine
- The limits of Stoicism
- What to do when mediating gives you anxiety
- The danger of "baited bounties"
- How to "get shit done" with non-attachment
- Using fantasy as a coping mechanism
Related Episodes:
- Stoic Practices for Getting Rid of Mental Junk, Your Morning Routine, and Talking to the Dead | Ryan Holiday
- Stoic Advice for Handling Setbacks, Insults, and Death | William Irvine
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDan Harris· Host0:00
[upbeat music] This is the Ten Percent Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. [upbeat music] Hey, gang. Today we're talking about the enormous power and relief and release that comes from shifting your perspective. One way of putting this is the old saw about how the problem isn't the problem, the problem is how you're relating to the problem. So today we're gonna talk about that, but we're also gonna talk about a whole bunch of other stoic principles, including focusing on what you can control and letting the rest fall by the wayside, which my guest calls, quote, "A major turn on." And we'll talk about the concept of, quote, "Digging it, baby, no matter what's happening." My guest is my friend Maria Semple, who's a well-known novelist. She is perhaps best known for her novel, which then turned into a movie, called Where'd You Go, Bernadette? And now she's got a new novel that's getting a ton of buzz called Go Gentle. I had the opportunity to read it early, and it's incredibly good, and it is filled with stoic principles because the protagonist is an expert on stoicism, which I should have said this earlier, but it's the ancient Greco-Roman philosophy, which itself has become incredibly buzzy in recent years. And Maria herself, as you will hear, is a big stoic