The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman | with guest Nitin Sharma

0:00Welcome to Business Book Club, the show where top entrepreneurs break down the most powerful insights from the world's best business books. I'm your host, Sam Brown, and today we're diving into The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman. It's a best-selling book with over 2 million copies sold and channels over two centuries of ancient wisdom from thinkers like Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca into sharp daily meditations for modern life. Why should this matter to you as a founder? Building a business will test every part of you. Your patience, your discipline, your ability to handle chaos.

0:35This book does not answer your business problems, but it will change how you face them. In today's episode, we'll explore how stoicism can sharpen your mindset as a founder, from navigating uncertainty to mastering your emotions, to keeping a sense of urgency about the limited time that you actually have. And joining me to unpack it all is someone who lives these ideas. Nitin Sharma is a serial entrepreneur in the recruitment tech and media space. He's the founder of rectools.io and the host of Rectalk, a YouTube-first podcast with over 90 ,000 subscribers, helping entrepreneurs and recruiters scale smarter.

1:13Nitin, thanks for joining me. I've asked you to highlight your three most valuable lessons from the book. What is your first lesson? Control what you can, let go of the rest. Unpack this a little bit for me. helped me understand that what do the stoics mean by control what you can and let go of the rest? They've got the thing about kind of emphasising, focusing your intention and your energies on the things that you can control. Everything else, things like people's opinions, external outcomes, the market, the industry in which you're operating in, the economy, these are things you can't control.

1:46It's really important in business to assess a situation and look at the controllables, which things here can I directly influence and which things do I not have any influence over whatsoever and that I think helps identify kind of which priority you need to take and kind of where you need to put your energy because otherwise you spend a lot of time kicking a can down the road worrying and complaining about things that are just never going to be any different. When did you read this book then? When did you start to internalise some of the lessons from the Stoics to be able to try and let go of that because I imagine that was quite a tumultuous time, did you already have these tools?

2:22No, I'd say less than a year ago. I couldn't tell you exactly when. Truthfully, I bought the book and then it sat on my bedside cabinet for absolutely ages because I just couldn't bring myself to switch off from the doom scrolling to actually spend a bit of time on me. And then I had a guest on my podcast and we had a really good conversation off camera. And he sort of started saying, you know, a lot of the things you say and the approach that you take is very stoic. And I was like, it's funny you say that. I've got a book about stoicism, but I haven't got around to reading it yet. And he's like, I think you should, because you're naturally kind of leaning towards some of these philosophies.

2:54And I think you'll find it really useful. Because look, we're all human, right? We all have weak points. We all have our moments in life where we're down and we react to things in a way that we shouldn't. And what I found this book did for me because of how it's structured, it's dated 366 days, and you read a page a day. So for someone like me with ADHD in a very, very short attention span, it's fantastic because I can read it, I can digest it, and then I can spend the rest of my day thinking about that message throughout my whole other life activities and whatever I'm getting involved in that day.

3:27But the fundamental message remains the same. And actually, the fundamental message isn't teaching me something that truthfully, I probably didn't already know. It's just presenting it to me in a way that, okay, yeah, you're not daft for thinking that, you know. In business, we hear control your controllables all the time. That's a phrase that's been thrown around for a decade. That's not to say that every person in business is a stoic. It's to say that this is a very, very good and applicable message in all walks of life. Going through the failing part of your scaling and failing the recruitment agency, what was it that you decided to let go of?

4:02What did you decide that you couldn't control? Truthfully, the hate. My story was slightly more complicated in that I had a business partner who I entrusted a lot of the business back end to things like the finances and so on and so forth. And that was directly after my father passed away. So I had to take a step back out of the business, gave him full control, and then sort of slowly returned back into the business, by which point he was very firmly in control of the company finances. And his wife was our accounts manager. And, you know, and I sort of thought, okay, well, look, if it's working, I'll leave it.

4:34I was very let down by some of the things that they had done things that came out after we started going through the business insolvency process and things are coming to the forefront of, okay, hang on, there was this and there was this and he's done this and he's done that. I couldn't change it. I couldn't go back and change that. I couldn't go back and change the decisions that I made. These are the cards that I've been dealt. Now I've got to work my way through and I've got to navigate my way through what is and isn't true. Right. And I've got to look at how much of this can I control? He stopped engaging with the insolvency practitioners.

5:07He stopped responding to them. He went personally bankrupt in the end to try and absolve himself of any financial liability. I can't control that. I can't change that. I can't change that's what he's done. I can moan about it. I can be annoyed about it. Of course I can, but that doesn't change anything. So now I've got to go, okay, what can I do? And what can I control? And that is keeping an open lines of communication, making sure that I've done everything I can in the right manner, making sure my nose is clean, accepting the fact that actually, do you know what, there probably is going to be a financial fallout off the back of this and try and limit what that is and the amount that that is as much as possible, rather than just spending my time and energy complaining and being annoyed at the fact that he got one over on me or I lost and he won kind of mentality.

5:49You know, it comes natural when you have these sorts of situations. Have you got any kind of tactics or takeaways of how people might be able to do that in the moment? I know it's often quite a difficult thing. Like you say, it comes naturally to you. So is it like self-talk? Do you have a mantra? Is there a way that you can actually apply this? It's a constant reminder. And my business is no different. It is no unique situation. Hundreds and thousands of people have been through similar stories. You can do everything right, and you can still fail. It's not that deep. As stupid as that sounds, it's just not that deep.

6:25You're going to win. You're going to lose. There's never going to be a time where you constantly achieve and achieve and win and win and win. There are going to be setbacks. It's called the law of accumulation. Everything is moving forwards or backwards. Nothing ever stands stationary. Once you accept that that's just kind of how the universe works, you are going to win some, you are going to lose some. The bills are going to keep coming. Regardless, the bills are going to keep coming. And what have you actually lost? Okay, you lost money. Well, money is something you can make again. Now, if I'm sat there on my deathbed and I'm thinking, this has caused me health angst to the point where I'm now severely unwell.

7:03Well, that's something I can't get back. I'm not going to recover from that. I can recover from a financial loss, but not a health loss. I know too many people who struggle with their mental health. I know too many people who have lost their battle to their mental health. I don't want to be that. I think you've got to constantly remind yourself that it just isn't that deep. It's not that big a deal. So it's like constantly reminding yourself of these things. Yeah, listen, there's going to be people in life that achieve better than you. There's going to be people in life that are doing worse than you.

7:30That's just the way it is. Stop competing. Control your controllables. Comes back to that all the time. You can't control the speed in which other people are performing, are growing, succeeding. You can't control that. What you can control is what you do with your day. And actually, if you can get to the end of the day and say, yeah, you know what? I've had a good day. I've achieved. And that's not financial merits. Did you set your goals for the day? Did you get what you wanted out of the day? or you sat there going, I've wasted today. Because they're two things you can control. You can do something different tomorrow.

7:59You can do the same again tomorrow. It's your choice. Let's move on to lesson number two. What do you have for us for lesson number two? Discipline over emotion. Can you unpack the two? Can you explain what you mean by discipline and what you mean by emotion first? Discipline is doing the right thing even when you feel as though it's not necessarily the thing that you want to do. You know what's right and you know what's wrong. Now, emotionally speaking, people will do things that are wrong and justify that emotion with facts to themselves to justify their decisions that they've made, right? There's times where you've done something that actually, yeah, that felt good, so I'm going to do that.

8:37But is that really the right thing to have done? Should you have done that? Should you have reacted that way? Not necessarily. Stoicism, the teachings behind that is that, look, disciplines, not emotions, should be driving your decision-making, right? Feelings are fleeting. they'll come in, they'll go, they'll change. But reason and structure are the things that keep us on track and on point. And that's the thing you should focus on. It's a tough one there, isn't it? Because how many people have set an alarm and then pressed the snooze button? Who hasn't done that? You know you want to get up, you know you want to go for a run in the morning, go to the gym, write that essay, whatever it might be.

9:09Seven o 'clock comes around and you're like, oh, I can just stay in bed till late. That's fine. Hit the snooze button a while. I live my life based on, I only do things that make me happy. I don't feel guilty when I have a lion. I don't feel guilty skipping a meeting. I don't feel guilty getting that bar of chocolate at 11 o 'clock in the evening while watching Netflix. I don't feel guilty doom scrolling on TikTok for an hour and going, oh crap, I've just been on this for an hour. Because my discipline to me is you did the thing that you were supposed to do. I did the start a business and hire staff and it became a to-do list.

9:43I've got to get to the office. I've got to do this. I've got to do that. That impacted the way I parented my kids, you know, and rushing them in the morning, getting them into school so I can get to the office because I need to set the day up and I need to do this and I need to do that. And all for what? Because it all come crashing down anyway. So when all of that happened, I was sort of like, I'm just going to do things that make me happy. And that's why I can justify taking six weeks off in the summer break and spending all of that time with my children. And that's why I can justify pressing that snooze button because that's no longer an emotion thing now.

10:11My discipline is, well, actually, listen, and if you're feeling tired and your health's not great and do you know what you just feel like having a you day have a you day who are you answering to why do we have this constant need to achieve are you happy with what you've got yes do you wish you had more of course i do but that's the emotion taken over the discipline is listen i eat every day i take my kids to school i pick them up most days i spend every weekend with them i have my friday nights out with my closest pals and i don't feel like i work but my job is what i do for a living which is effectively doing podcasts i've managed to carve out a living that allows me to have fun all the time.

10:47That was the discipline thing. It doesn't always have to be have an ice plunge at 5am and go for a fucking run and do this. It doesn't have to be that. Not everybody in business has to be a high achieving entrepreneur 100xing their business with an exit in mind. Not everybody has to be that. And not everybody wants to be that. I think it's a Russian or Mexican proverb of a fisherman owns a lake and he sits and he fishes all day long and he takes the fish, he takes them to the market, sells them and then spends the rest of his day at home. And a guy from the New York Stock Exchange is on holiday there and he sits down and says, oh, you own all of this lake and that's brilliant.

11:21We could invest in you and we could turn this lake into a fishery and we could really ramp up production and you could sell loads more fish and make loads more money. And you can eventually exit your business for like 10x what we invest and then what would you do with your time? And he's gone, probably go down by the lake, do some fishing, go to the fish market, sell some fish. Do you know what I mean? I'd live the life I'm living now. So what am I chasing? What am I doing it for? Yeah, they speak about that quite a lot in the book, don't they? Around trying to really plan and decipher exactly what it is that you do want.

11:54Because if you don't understand that, there's no way at all that you'll be able to get it. It's just noise, right? Listen, I love seeing young entrepreneurs do well and sit there on their private jets and talk about their holidays in Dubai. That's great. That's honestly fantastic for them. It's just not for me. And so that doesn't mean that I'm less motivated or less disciplined than they are. I'm just disciplined in another way. I've got business owners that are my clients that can't take a week away from their business without worrying that their business is going to fall apart. And I've just taken six weeks off and I'm going to do it again.

12:27That's discipline. Your discipline is taking a different form to most, most in the kind of the entrepreneurial world anyways, to make sure that you're looking after your own mental health, your own family life, and essentially your own happiness. That is possibly even a harder discipline to do. Genuinely feel for people that end up in that capitalist circus, I call it, right? Oh, I'm going to buy a bigger house and I'm going to get a newer car and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that. Why? Who for? I don't understand. Did you do an exercise where you discovered what it was that you wanted or what was enough for you?

13:00Yeah, actually, I think if I kind of cast my mind back, my old business partner, I don't talk about him a lot anymore because of everything that happened, but we were very, very tight. We were effectively brothers, but we both ran in very different circles and very different lives. I remember when we were talking about growing and scaling the business, and I remember kind of being like, you know, I just don't feel that excited by this. And what it fundamentally came back down to was that he had hopes, ambitions and dreams of a bigger house and a nicer car and some investments and some money in the bank and that kind of thing.

13:32And fortunately, through the grace of the good Lord, through support of people like my wife and my parents, I was in a very financially comfortable position. And I was like, look, I've got the nice house. I've got the nice car at the time. I've got the investment properties. I've got the money in the bank. I've got all of those things. So I don't have the same drive that you do. And I think at that point was when I started realizing that maybe I'm kind of falling off this wheel, the hamster wheel of what is success, because I look at your ultra, ultra mega successful entrepreneurs and kind of just don't understand why they still work.

14:04Why would you if you've got that much wealth and that much success? Like, what are you racing? Who are you doing this for now? And obviously, they're wired differently, and they're motivated by different things, right? It took a while for me to kind of start accepting that I'm not weird, I'm just wired differently. And actually, I don't find the joy in material things that other people maybe do. But I'm finding more and more that there's more people like me because rat race is a term you used. And it's a funny one because we use it so often, right? And there comes a point where you kind of like you don't want to run the rat race anymore.

14:37And then you realize that I'm not even a rat. I'm not one of these people. I remember walking through London all suited and booting, looking around and feeling like an imposter and be like, I don't even want to be here. This is not me. I don't want to do this. I'm going into an investment meeting about to talk to a VC for a six-figure investment. I don't even want to do this. I'd rather be at home with my kids. I'd rather be up in the Lake District, or I'd rather be at the pub with my mates. And then just accepting that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it. I can pretend to be a corporate guy.

15:07I can pretend to say all the things that you want to hear for you to write me a check, but truthfully, I don't really want it. I've got to be honest, that wasn't where I thought discipline over emotion was going to go. You hear a lot of the, you've only got 24 hours in the day. And if you're sleeping for eight of them, then what are you doing with the rest of the time and that kind of thing? I get it. And hey, listen, best of luck to you. But I think if you can do more with less, then that takes some discipline too, right? I can't remember the last time I worked eight hours in a day. I can't remember a day when I worked less.

15:34I don't want to, you know, and hey, that level of hard work might really kind of give you the big tick in the box that you need to feel like you're achieving. But for me, it feels like I'm doing a to-do list that's not even my to-do list. Going back to that discipline over emotion, I've got to be true to what I want, which is I just want to do fun shit that makes me happy. And that means that I've got to then make decisions that allow me to have that time back to me. I do have a question though, because you mentioned social media earlier and you don't beat yourself up for spending an hour doing scrolling on TikTok.

16:05What do you think of social media though, because to me, they kind of seem like they are built to hijack your emotions. We're talking here about discipline over emotions. So they seem like they hijack your emotions and erode your discipline. And it's a super strong-willed person that sees a post that they made on Instagram and they got three times as many likes and don't feel that kind of dopamine spike. How do you view that and pass that out with your discipline over emotion as well? that in itself takes a lot of discipline a good analogy would be if you're training in mixed martial arts you know that punching the punching bag so many times is going to hurt but you do it anyway right you do it anyway because you know that the outcome of that is going to be that you become stronger more durable and so on and so forth same mentality when you think you know because nobody truly knows but when you think you know the way things work when you accept that hey I'm about to doom scroll on social media and I'm going to see a bunch of shit that isn't true.

17:05I'm going to see a bunch of people pretending to have lives that they haven't really got. It's a window that they're portraying to the world and the rest of their life is probably falling apart. When you know the game, it takes some discipline then to not get caught up in the emotion and not to be like, well, hang on a minute, I'm going to comment on this or I'm going to call this out. I do it just because I like to know what the trends are. I like to know what's funny and what's not. I like to know what's going on in the world outside of just my own four walls because I don't watch the news and I don't particularly enjoy reading things like the newspapers and articles and things like that.

17:34So it's my way of keeping in touch with the outside world outside of my head, but also fully accepting the fact that a lot of it is smoke and mirrors and bullshit. You don't go to watch a Marvel movie and be like, oh my God, this is real. It's the same thing. Go on to Instagram and TikTok and just accept that there's people out there that are going to pretend to be doing much better than you. And hey, good for them. You've internalized the stoic mentality so much that you use things just in your day-to-day life to practice. When I ask about social media, you're like, this is another opportunity to practice discipline over emotion.

18:05Yeah, it's an interesting take that I've not really heard. My sort of closing thoughts on this bit would be that everything is an opportunity to practice discipline over emotion. Opening the fridge at 10 o 'clock at night and looking at the snacks and then looking at a piece of fruit is discipline over emotion for some people. Going outside and about to light up that fag and thinking, I'm not going to smoke today. That's discipline over emotion. Everybody has examples throughout their day where they can do it. It doesn't have to be some grand gesture, but little things, I think those are little wins and hey, you deserve them.

18:35You should celebrate them. What is your third lesson? Memento mori. Use time wisely. Memento mori. It's Latin for remember you must die. This sounds morbid, but the Soics don't view it as kind of a morbid thing to think. Tell us more about it. Death is a natural part of life, right? None of us actually know what happens afterwards and we don't know whether it's finite or infinite, right? But it's factual. You will one day no longer walk amongst everyone else. Use that time wisely. I remember being stood at my dad's funeral and I'm talking about his life and all the rest of it. And I'm looking around and bear in mind, this is during peak COVID.

19:17So everyone's social distance and we only had a limited number of people that were allowed to attend. And I'm looking out and I'm going, we all stand here because of my mum and my dad. And there was nephews, nieces, it was a large family. And I'm gone, isn't this what your legacy should be? And that sort of started changing my mindset towards how I parent my kids. Honestly, hand on heart, I say this as often as I can, in the hope that one day when they're older, they hear these things back in some way. I genuinely believe my only purpose on this planet is to be a dad to those two kids. I'm also then very, very aware that I'm only a momentary part of their life.

19:57They're going to have, God willing, a very long life, and I'm only going to be a small part of that. So do I want to spend that time grafting, working, building my empire, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, or do I want to spend that time with them, giving them memories, giving them lessons, giving them things to think about, and actually leaving a mark on them? and in exactly the same way, I don't remember the last conversation I had with my dad. I hadn't spoken to him for sort of three or four days before he passed away and that stuck with me because you don't know the last thing you're going to say to somebody.

20:26You don't know them when the last time you're going to see them is. And so maybe don't be a dick or maybe don't say that thing that you feel that you need to say because you need to get that ego boost. Just don't do it. You're not here forever. So use that time wisely, man. Do the things that you want to do. It comes back down to the, I only want to do fun shit that makes me happy. I could spend the next 20, 25 years building a media empire within the recruitment space, but then what? By that point, my kids are older. They don't want to know. They've got their own lives going on. I've missed out on all the things that are important to me today in search for something that I thought was important.

21:01And hey, tomorrow I could walk out of here and get hit by a bus. I think the quote that you sent over to me on the chat before, you said here, you could leave life right now, let that determine what you do and say and think. People have this memento mori, like some people are tattooed, some people have it as a mantra kind of thing they say to themselves often, and that's the longer hand of saying memento mori. When do you find yourself saying this most often to yourself? I don't. Truthfully, I don't. It's ingrained in me now. These things are ingrained in me, in how I operate, how I react to things.

21:37We all have our moments of weakness, And there's always times where I do things and think, oh, for God's sake, like, you know, that was really petty. I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have said that. I shouldn't have been like this. There's a subtle beauty in being able to hold your hands up and saying, you know, I cocked up there and I feel bad for it. And I'd like to make amends and I'd like to make it right. Because, again, that's memento mori, right? I don't know when I'm going to have a chance to make this right with you again. And I'd really rather not have to think about that. Let's take this maybe into the business setting a little bit because we're talking to a bunch of founders here.

22:05and I suppose where my mind's going is that conducting business in a good way, in like a reputable way, in an honest way might be like a short-term difficult thing to do, but it has like long-term benefits here. Absolutely. I think one thing to consider, right, I ran my recruitment business in such a way that candidates were given the best possible outcome and the best possible service every time. Clients were given the best possible service and the best possible outcome every time. Remember, you will die. The stats are 80 % of businesses won't make it past 10 years. There's a strong likelihood that your business today will not look the same, feel the same, or be the same as it is in 10 years time.