Amor Fati: Love Everything That Happens | Read By Ryan Holiday

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2:23welcome to the weekend edition of the daily stoic podcast on sundays we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the stoic texts audiobooks that we like here recommend here at daily stoic and other long form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend we hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy and most importantly that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

3:04Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It seems insane to me. I was just, I was just so, when I write books, I basically, I write them in Google Docs first. And at some point the draft all comes together in a Word doc, because this is what they use in publishing. and quite frankly, Google Docs gets too unwieldy and big and it starts to glitch up. So at some point, my books switched to Microsoft Word and I've been using it a long time. You wanna know how long I've been using it? Well, I found here, this is a draft. This is a T-O-I-T-W, the obstacle is the way working draft end of day.

3:40This is the file name 404. That's April 4th, 2013. 13. So almost 11 years ago now, exactly, I was working on this book. I may have been on that day writing this very chapter of The Obstacle is the Way, one of my favorite chapters in my first book on stoicism. It's about how we don't just accept what happens. We embrace it. We love it. We get better for it. You know, the funny thing is I came up with that file naming thing that says end of day because I would save the draft every day. I would email it to myself. I wanted it in multiple places. This is in Dropbox and everything because I was just afraid of losing everything, right?

4:24Losing what you'd spent so many months on. And I have lost things that I had worked quite a bit on and it's devastating at first, but you get back from it. I actually added now in the 10-year anniversary of the book, which will come out in the fall. I'm just finishing it up right now. a chapter about that very thing happening to Hemingway. Hopefully it won't happen to you, but hopefully you will like this chapter. This is a chapter of the audio book from The Obstacle is the Way. Amor Fati is, I think, the essence of stoicism. It's a really important idea in stoicism. I actually have here, I just finally have a little bowl on my desk.

5:02This is the Amor Fati medallion that I made with Robert Green. We sell it at store.dailystoic.com. I'll link to that. But anyways, here's the obstacle's way. If you haven't read the book, the audio book, ebook, grab that and grab signed copies in the Daily Stoic store. And if you like this chapter, if you like the idea of Amor Fati, you can grab the coin of it at store.dailystoic.com. Thanks to Penguin Random House Audio for letting me publish this. Thanks first and foremost to Tim Ferriss, who encouraged me to do the audio book of this all these years ago and helped me publish it. Those rights reverted back to the publisher recently, and he was a very cool dude about it.

5:37But in the meantime, I'm going to bring that to you. I hope you're having a great Sunday. And I hope you like this excerpt of my first book on Stoicism, which is now 11 years old.

5:58Love everything that happens. Amor fati. My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati. that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity, not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it, but love it. Nietzsche At age 67, Thomas Edison returned home early one evening from another day at the laboratory. Shortly after dinner, a man came rushing into his house with urgent news. A fire had broken out at Edison's research and production campus a few miles away. Fire engines from eight nearby towns rushed to the scene, but they could not contain the blaze.

6:45Fueled by the strange chemicals in the various buildings, green and yellow flames shot up six and seven stories, threatening to destroy the entire empire Edison had spent his life building. Edison calmly but quickly made his way to the fire, through the now hundreds of onlookers and devastated employees looking for his son. Go get your mother and all her friends, he told his son with childlike excitement. They'll never see a fire like this again. What? Don't worry, Edison calmed him. It's all right. We've just got rid of a lot of rubbish. That's a pretty amazing reaction. But when you think about it, there really was no other response.

7:26What should Edison have done? Wept? Gotten angry? Quit and gone home? What exactly would that have accomplished? You know the answer now. It's nothing. So he didn't waste time indulging himself. To do great things, we need to be able to endure tragedy and setbacks. We've got to love what we do and all that it entails, good and bad. We have to learn to find joy in every single thing that happens. Because there was a little more than rubbish in Edison's buildings, Years and years of priceless records, prototypes, and research were turned to ash. The buildings, which had been made of what was supposedly fireproof concrete, had been insured for only a fraction of their worth.

8:13Thinking that they were immune to such disasters, Edison and his investors were covered for about a third of the damage. Still, Edison wasn't heartbroken. Not as he could have and probably should have been. Instead, it invigorated him. As he told a reporter the next day He wasn't too old to make a fresh start I've been through a lot of things like this, he said It prevents a man from being afflicted with ennui Within about three weeks The factory was partially back up and running Within a month, its men were working two shifts a day Churning out new products that the world had never seen Despite a loss of almost$1 million More than$23 million in today's dollars Edison would marshal enough energy to make nearly$10 million in revenue that year, $200 plus million today.

9:05He not only suffered a spectacular disaster, but he recovered and replied to it spectacularly. The next step after we discard our expectations and accept what happens to us, after understanding that certain things, particularly bad things, are outside our control, is this. loving whatever happens to us and facing it with unfailing cheerfulness. It is the act of turning what we must do into what we get to do. We put our energies and emotions and exertions where they will have real impact. This is that place. We will tell ourselves, this is what I've got to do or put up with. Well, I might as well be happy about it.

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11:26Here's an image to consider. The great boxer Jack Johnson in his famous 15-round brawl with Jim Jeffries. Jeffries, the great white hope, called out of retirement like some deranged Cincinnatus to defeat the ascendant black champion. And Johnson, genuinely hated by his opponent in the crowd, still enjoying every minute of it, smiling, joking, playing the whole fight. Why not? There's no value in any other reaction. Should he hate them for hating him? Bitterness was their burden, and Johnson refused to pick it up. Not that he simply took the abuse. Instead, Johnson designed his fight plan around it.

12:09At every nasty remark from Jeffrey's corner, he'd give his opponent another lacing. At every low trick or rush from Jeffries, Johnson would quip and beat it back, but never lose his cool. And when one well-placed blow opened a cut on Johnson's lip, he kept smiling, a gory, bloody, but nevertheless cheerful smile. Every round he got happier, friendlier, as his opponent grew enraged, tired, eventually losing the will to fight. In your worst moments, picture Johnson, always calm, always in control, genuinely loving the opportunity to prove himself, to perform for people, whether they wanted him to succeed or not.

12:51Each remark bringing the response it deserved and no more, letting the opponent dig his own grave. Until the fight ended with Jeffreys on the floor and every doubt about Johnson silenced. As Jack London, the famous novelist, reported from the ringside seats, No one understands him, this man who smiles, while the story of the fight is the story of a smile. If ever a man won by nothing more fatiguing than a smile, Johnson won today. That man is us, or rather it can be us, if we strive to become like him. For we're in our own fight with our own obstacles, and we can wear them down with our relentless smile, frustrating the people or impediments attempting to frustrate us.

13:38We can be Edison, our factory on fire, not bemoaning our fate, but enjoying the spectacular scene, and then starting the recovery effort the very next day, roaring back soon enough. Your obstacle may not be so serious or violent, but they are nevertheless significant and outside your control. They warrant only one response, a smile. As the Stoics commanded themselves, cheerfulness in all situations, especially the bad ones. Who knows where Edison and Johnson learned this epigram, but they clearly did. Learning not to kick and scream about matters we can't control is one thing. Indifference and acceptance are certainly better than disappointment or rage.

14:22Very few understand or practice that art, but it is only a first step. Better than all of that is love for all that happens to us, for every situation. The goal is not I'm okay with this, not I think I feel good about this, but I feel great about it. Because if it happened, then it was meant to happen, and I am glad that it did when it did. I am meant to make the best of it. And proceed to do exactly that. We don't get to choose what happens to us, but we can always choose how we feel about it. and why on earth would you choose to feel anything but good? We can choose to render a good account of ourselves.

15:09If the event must occur, amor fati, a love of fate, is the response. Don't waste a second looking back at your expectations. Face forward and face it with a smug little grin. It's important to look at Johnson and Edison because they weren't passive. They didn't simply roll over and tolerate adversity. They accepted what happened to them. They liked it. It's a little unnatural, I know, to feel gratitude for things we never wanted to happen in the first place. But we know at this point, the opportunities and benefits that lay within adversities. We know that in overcoming them, we emerge stronger, sharper, empowered.

15:51There's little reason to delay these feelings, to begrudgingly acknowledge later that it was for the best, when we could have felt that in advance, because it was inevitable. You love it because it's all fuel. And you don't just want fuel, you need it. You can't go anywhere without it. No one or no thing can. So you're grateful for it. That is not to say that the good will always outweigh the bad or that it comes free and without cost. But there is always some good, even if only barely perceptible at first, contained within the bad. and we can find it and be cheerful because of it.

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