LIFE CHANGING Stoic Ideas That You Can Practice Daily | Ryan Holiday

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:16If there were three things that everyone could take away from the Stoics to improve the quality of their life right now, what would that be? One of the questions we ask ourselves when we're afraid of something, when we're thinking about it, we go, but what about me? What would I do if? And Marcus Reelus goes, you'll meet that with the same weapons you've met all your other problems. So remembering that like, hey, you've been scared before and you're still here. Often what our fear is really doing is underestimating or undercounting how good we actually are at what we do. Like you're not suddenly tomorrow going to be a helpless loser.

0:54You're the same person you are today. And what will you do? You'll figure it out. just like if you quit your job you'd be like i'm quitting and i'm gonna go find a new job but if you got fired that suddenly feels like disempowered whereas the other one feels very empowered so remembering what you're capable of to me is really important okay number two uh the stoics say that we should always be training so one of the reasons i think it's important to have like a physical practice one of the reasons it's good to seek out adversity and difficulty is so when stuff happens, you're right. Epictetus, one of the early Stoics, he's actually a slave.

1:33And he says, you want to get to a point where when stuff happens, you're able to say like, this is what I trained for. You knew this could happen. Man. And you did the work. Yes. Before you go into the next one, it's right when the pandemic happened, I was like, this sucks. And yet I've been training for this for the last like 12, 13 years of my life. Yes. Because in 2008, when I, well, in 2007, I got injured and had surgery. And then 2008, the housing crisis, and there were no jobs for someone like me without a college degree that was ignorant from school. I was like, I better develop myself so that when this happens again in 5, 10, 20 years, I'm ready to take on any adversity.

2:12Maybe it's not fun and it's still challenging, but I'm prepared and ready. And I spent 13 years training for that moment. And I felt a sense of, kind of weirdly, I felt a sense of peace that gave me the energy and the clarity to take action and shift where I needed to and lead from a place of courage as opposed to, and I wasn't perfect, but lead from a more calm, peaceful place as opposed to a frantic, fearful place. Well, look, preparation makes you brave, right? You prepared so you were ready. And then I think also because you remembered what you felt then, you were also in a position to lead and understand what people who were not as prepared needed to hear.

2:56Yeah, what they're experiencing. It sucks. So you can have empathy like you talked about. You can connect with people in that way. Okay, so always be training. Always be learning something new, training yourself physically, mentally, emotionally. And the third one would be this stoic exercise of memento mori, which basically means remember you will die. I I actually carry a coin in my pocket that says this. But I think when you realize like, hey, life is already short and fragile. If I'm spending my time cowering in fear or worrying, I'm acting as if I have a certain power over things that I don't.

3:32There's this famous Stoic story where like the emperor sees this Stoic philosopher he hates and he's like, I'm threatening you to death, or I'm sentencing you to death. And he's like, I was already sentenced to death. At some point. Yeah, he's like, you have no more power over me than I had, than life itself has. Than Mother Nature. Yeah, it just means dying. I think sometimes people can miss this. Like, memento mori doesn't mean, like, don't wear a motorcycle helmet or pretend the pandemic is not real. That's not what it's saying. But it's saying, like, hey, focus on the parts of safety and concern that are in your control.

4:06But if you're wasting your time being afraid, that's something I thought a lot about in the pandemic, especially early on. We don't know where this is going, don't know what it means, don't know what is ticking clock is in anyone's body, right? What pre-existing condition you might have or bad piece of luck you got. So you take it seriously. But within that, what are you doing with your time? What are you going to spend your time on? So if you're spending that time worrying, stressing, watching the news all day. Yeah, what you're actually doing is rejecting the life that you have in front of you.

4:44It's kind of like a longer eclipse. It's like there's an eclipse that's happening. We don't know what this is, but you can sit there and worry and fear for those five minutes of eclipse or whatever. Or you can look up and enjoy it and do something with your time and make the most of this and prepare and strategize and organize your time. Yeah. James Stockdale, who spends seven years in a prison camp in Vietnam, who reads the Stoics, he says, you know, he gets there and he goes, I never lost sight of the fact that I control the end of the story and that I could turn this into something that in retrospect I would not have traded for.

5:24So I think we have, it takes courage to say, this thing happened to me and I wouldn't have chosen it. I didn't want it. But now that it's here, I'm going to face it. I'm going to apply all my training and experience towards it. And then I'm not going to waste my life being bitter, resentful, afraid, passive about it. And I'm just going to get to work turning it into something.

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