Are You Afraid to Start? | 10 Years Of Lessons From The Obstacle Is The Way

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1:18Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

1:44Are you afraid to start? It could fail. It could go badly. It could be harder than you expect it. It could. But how will you know? How will you know until you start? That's the one thing all fools do, Seneca said. They delay to start. They put it off. They let their fears or their laziness win. And this is where two essential stoic virtues come in, courage and discipline. We have to be brave enough to push past our fears. We have to be strong enough to will ourselves to do what needs to be done. Perhaps this is where the third virtue comes in, justice. What you're doing might be important. It could make a real difference.

2:23It could fail, but it could also help people. And here you are putting it off. Here you are taking counsel of your fears, letting the resistance win. And this is not without cost to yourself and to others. Don't be afraid to start. Don't put it off any longer. Do it. Do what you can. Do good. That's the whole goal behind the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge. It's designed to push you to get started, to get the ball rolling, to build momentum, to help you make 2025 the year you realize just how strong you are to challenge you to do what you are capable of doing in this life. And if you're worried that it's all too much, that it might be hard, that it's this or that, well, let's remember what Seneca said, that no man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity, for he is never permitted to prove himself.

3:15And for the last six months, we've been working on the Daily Stoic New Year New Challenge. We redo it every year, we come up with a bunch of stoic-inspired challenges and practices that will help you become what you are capable of becoming. And it's designed to meet the unique year that is 2025. And it's gearing up to be a crazy year. But just imagine starting every day of this new year with a clear, actionable challenge, one you can't procrastinate, one you can't get out of, just a powerful push to help propel you closer to the life you want. And I want to see you in there. I do the challenge every year.

3:52Thousands of other Stoics all over the world do it. And I'm pumped to see you in there. It starts on January 1st. Don't delay. Don't put it off. Sign up. I'll see you in there. Dailystoic.com slash challenge. It's always funny to hear the people who did put it off because customer service rep Ashley goes, I got so many emails on the first and the second and the third people asking if they still sign up. Can we let them in? Well, yes, I want to see you in there. DailyStoic.com slash challenge. Don't delay. Let's have an awesome new year.

4:33almost 10 years ago in a very different office than this it was this small nook under a loft bed in an apartment in new york city i started working on this book called the obstacle is the way flash forward now that book has sold millions of copies it's in 40 languages i'm also a very different person than I was when I wrote it. And I'm having this unique experience of the publisher asked me to write a new forward, to go in and kind of correct things, change things, tweak things, update. The obstacle is the way.

5:21Here are my note cards. I have a stack of note cards that I've accumulated since the book came out of just little things that I definitely want to add. So I have these. And then this is the box. This is the book. As I wrote it, I'm gonna have to go back through these cards, like look, this is an email. An email I sent myself as I was writing the intro of The Obstacles Away. Let's see when I do that. Hey, gosh. This is the intro. This is a chunk of the intro of The Obstacles Away, which I sent myself as a note in June of that year, I think. So I was already working on the intro and then this made it into the book.

6:03So I'm just going back through and tweaking stuff. I'm already making some changes. That's my next little project, the 10th anniversary edition of the obstacles way.

6:18Almost 10 years ago, exactly, I was in this exact spot. I was going for a run along the East River in Manhattan. And this idea popped into my head. When something like in the year 170, in his tent on the front line in the war in Germania, Marcus Aurelius sat down to write. That's the first line in The Obstacle is the Way. I was on my run and it just popped into my head. That book has gone on to sell millions of copies. It reintroduced stoicism to millions of people. It's been this incredible journey that I could not have anticipated. But I sort of take two quick lessons from that. One, it's always a good idea to go for a run.

6:56When you get your body moving, you have no idea what can pop into your head. And two, there's this stoic idea that we never step in the same river twice. The river's different. I'm different. I'm standing in the exact spot. But so much has transpired. How I would even think about that line, how I think about the stoics has changed. We are always changing. The world is always changing, even though things stay the same. And that's the lesson.

7:21Seneca wasn't just a philosopher. He was a writer. And so he knew this very acutely, the mortification you feel when you go back and read or edit something. Not just that you did, but that you put out in the world. He says, when I think of all the things I have said, I envy the mute. This process of going back through and updating The Obstacle is the Way 10 years later, of listening to my voice on the audiobook, having to redo the audiobook, changing sentences, seeing sentences that not just like I put out in the world, but literally millions of people saw. you envy the mute it's a very humbling thing to go back and look at what you did and what you thought was your best work and maybe indeed was your best work at that time and you see what does or doesn't age well i think what doesn't age well is certainty simplification judgment and so hopefully as i've gone back through the obstacles way i've softened some of those things i've been kinder more empathetic more nuanced mostly i'm trying to take that forward on the next project.

8:21Like if you think about that unpleasant feeling, I get to adjust it, fix it here. I can't undo that. It happened in the past. What I can do though, is on my next project, be a little wiser, be a little kinder, be a little bit more open-minded, do a little bit more work. So in a way that's the real lesson. That's like the way I'm getting better for having gone through this at sometimes this sometimes agonizing process. I'm seeing all the ways that I have changed and become better in the last 10 years, but I want to become better so that when I look at this edition in 10 years, there's still going to be some mortifications, still going to be some changes I want to make, but hopefully fewer of them still.

9:21I haven't written the new preface yet, but you can see all the red stuff. So, here's just some tweaks. There's a whole, like I'm adding stuff. Like I have this chapter about Rockefeller in the book, and like, obviously Rockefeller was not the greatest dude, so I'm sort of qualifying that. There's a paragraph there. I'm cutting, there's a section on Rommel that I'm cutting. This is a piece about the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. He's saying that I've done this in like a million talks. So, and I found it after I finished the book and I would talk about it when I would talk about the obstacles away, the audience has always loved it.

9:59So I'm adding that in the book, but he has this great line. He says that in space, when you run into a problem, there's a bunch of things you can do to make a situation better. And then he says, there's no problem so bad that you cannot make it worse also. So that's going in there. For instance, I've already messed with, let's see, I did a lot on one of my favorite stories in the book, which is how Marcus, at the end of his life, so I'm adding, this is a deeper story that the end of the book, as I wrote it 10 plus years ago, was only about Marcus and the fight against Evidius Cassius, but I'm taking this more fuller picture of Marcus, which is the plague that he faces, the floods that he faces, his stomach ailment, the years at war, burying children, just like a life of pain and struggle.

10:48There's this ancient historian that says that Marcus doesn't meet with the good fortune that he deserves, and his whole reign is involved in a series of troubles. And so I'm sort of talking about how Marcus's life embodies this idea of the obstacles, the way that he doesn't just coin the phrase that his life really illustrates how he lived it. So anyways, these are all the stuff, the things that I'm and I have to turn it in by beginning of January to get it out for the 10th anniversary. So that's what I'm working on.

11:32As crazy as this week has been, I feel like I will spin off the planet if I don't get at least one small look at the manuscript I'm supposed to be working on, which is the 10 year anniversary of obstacles. My rule, this is like a discipline thing too, is like you don't have to be perfect all the time. You don't have to make enormous contributions. You just have to make lots of little contributions. And so if I can just go, hey, did I do one or two good things to the manuscript this week? That's enough. That's what I'm doing now. So I'm literally, it's literally, it might seem like this isn't what a writer does.

12:06You know, it's like spitting a globe and just pointing out where you're going to go. I'm literally just kind of like rolling the dice and pulling up a random spot and just kind of spot checking and seeing what I want to fix.

12:21Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on. thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

13:06We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven it across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory.

13:47Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours.

14:01Go ahead. Yes. Probably the biggest change between writing it the first time and working on it now has just came in my life or my lifestyle. I was with my wife when I was writing The Obstacles Away, but we lived in this tiny apartment in New York City. We had a dog, but we didn't have kids. We weren't married. and as I'm working on it now, I have two kids. My son is turning eight this fall, so he's almost as old as the book. But my life is noisier. My life is more unpredictable. My life is more chaotic. I have more responsibilities. It's not right to say that having kids is an obstacle. It's not, but it is a challenge.

14:44It is a constant trial. It challenges you in so many ways. And as I have been working on the book, that's one of the things I thought a lot about is how do these ideas inform me as a parent? How do you apply these ideas to the unpredictable, crazy, exhausting, overwhelming 24-7 job that is raising human beings? Where do I find the time to work on this book in addition to all the things that I have going on? it was a lot the last 10 years have been a lot it is thanksgiving it is thanksgiving 2023 my kids are watching spongebob on the tv there and i am in florida on vacation down by the beach and i am working on the preface of the new intro I've been chugging away on this and it's just going to be like maybe one two pages at the beginning of the book to mark the fact that 10 plus years ago I sat down to write this book I'm talking about the fact that this one person I knew predicted it would sell 5 ,000 copies the obstacles away sold more like 2 million copies there was probably a couple thousand people who cared about stoicism on the internet at that time.

16:05And now every morning, the Daily Stoic reaches a million people by like 9 a.m. So that's sort of what I'm talking about, how I've come to interact and understand the material since so much has happened, since it came out. There was the pandemic. There was the books doing well. There was hundreds of thousands of miles on the road. There was getting married. There was having kids. Just a lot of life. And that's what the new intro is about. And then we're going to go have Thanksgiving together as a family.

16:50We are heading to the breakfast club to do the right thing right now. and then my publisher is like right here and I have to drop off the 10 year anniversary manuscript of Obstacle to get hit by a car.

17:24It's crazy to me that 10 years ago, almost exactly, this book was being released, my first book on stoicism, and now I'm editing the 10-year anniversary in the green room of The Breakfast Club. I've got to drop this off on my publisher, who, when I wrote it the first time, was way downtown on Barrick Street, and now is all the way up here near the park because Penguin merge with Random House but now I'm just tightening up. This is the second pass which I guess now is like my fifth or sixth pass because I've done it so many times but...

18:12Keeping our word does cost us but it's not free to break your word because the next time that person's not going to trust someone else. And so we all think about it as like what's good for me, but what we're doing is we're stealing from the public trust, from our ability to collaborate and count on each other because everyone's saying you know your word isn't worth anything and collectively unfortunately in a lot of cases it's not. I pride myself on being honest and truthful at all times. I love chapter three in the book Tell the Truth but I think sometimes when we say I'm gonna be honest with you, it's a It's a buffer to this whammy I'm about to leave.

18:49I'm actually going to be a dick is what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

19:13So I'm still pretty old school about it. Not only do I write the books with physical note cards, having read physical books, but then I do all my notes. I have the publisher print them, like print me out of bound manuscript. I want to see what it's going to look like in the size that it's going to be. And then I do all my notes. This is the second pass, but... So I realized something crazy. I realized that I sent the first draft of this from 11 years ago on a plane, climbing across Australia and then here. It doesn't feel like it's in the respects. Am I in here? Where?

20:05Wow, the Trespinam Lions up there? That's incredible.

20:15Oh, they're not behind the glass?

20:22Yeah, try to keep your hands to yourself. How do I get all six seats? Oh, there's opposite camera. Oh, where? Okay, that's insane. So then we'll have to replace it with a new one. Do you think that's a first edition? It might be.

20:47I am now having to do the new audiobook. It's a Saturday. I got up early. I came here before my kid's soccer game. It was supposed to be a 20, 25-minute drive. It took 50 minutes. I was getting frustrated about the traffic. Then I came upon the source of the traffic, and it was a fatal car accident. There was the body out in the road covered in a tarp and it sort of put some things in perspective. And I was trying to think, okay, what did I do with the extra 25 minutes? Was I as in control of my emotions as I'd like to be? I don't think so. But I listened to a nice podcast in the road. I learned something.

21:26It gave me an excuse to text a friend about that podcast. So I'm going to see it as a positive and then I get to come here and do what I love. I noticed something here that I need to fix already. That's the other thing about audiobooks. What they are is a chance for you to read the draft all the way through very slowly, sort of performatively, and you catch some stuff that you want to fix.

21:56When you go through the book, how do you determine what you want to change and what stays? There's a bunch of very specific things that I had notes that I wanted to change. And then I kind of, I would just, you know, every day I was working on it, I would just open it, flip to a random spot, and then just kind of reread it and ask myself, hey, is this how I would say this now? How could this be said better? What is this missing? so a lot of times it was stuff like that and then on the even during the audiobook which i just did and in this chair having to say every word of it out loud was like an excruciating experience because i hadn't done that for 11 years yeah and to go through and have to say things that you put into print a decade ago.

22:51There's a Seneca thing. He says, when I think of all the things that I have said, I envy the mute. And the experience of editing something you've already published or re-recording the audio book of something that millions of people have listened to, you're like, I mean, it's horrifying because you go, I said that, like I, I allowed myself to leave it at that. And I mean, not everywhere. There's lots and lots and lots of parts of the obstacles away I'm very proud of. But if you can reread something you wrote or worked on a long time ago and you think it's perfect. I mean, to me, that's a sign that you haven't gotten any better since you've done it.

23:39Like the idea that you don't have improvements to make to me would imply that that was the peak, which I definitely don't think is true. And I definitely don't want to be true. I mean, what was the point of continuing to do it if you're not getting any better? I always think you have a unique relationship to your work and that it's like a lot of your favorite stuff as a reader that you're bringing together. Sure. And the experience of going back and looking at a lot of those stories, I imagine was like, I actually think the lesson embedded in that story is different than I initially thought. Yeah.

24:14Well, that's the idea that when they say, no, you don't step in the same river twice, that's the other part of it is that what stands out at you in a specific story is different. And yeah, the meaning of it can be different. Um, so yeah, like when I talked about Rockefeller at 24, I'm just thinking of him. And I'm only thinking about him in the context of how did this guy overcome obstacles? I'm only thinking of the heroic aspects. But then the book I wrote immediately after was about ego. And then I wrote a book about stillness. And then I've written a book about discipline. And then I wrote a book about justice.

24:55And so if those subsequent deep dives into topics don't inform your worldview going forward, what does that say? And so now, and of course I understood these things about Rockefeller, but that wasn't what I was focused on. Those weren't like the salient things that were jumping out at me. But now looking back at this person and my own writing and what I want the book to mean to people, you're adding on these additional layers. And I think the portrait that I present of him is more nuanced. And then also just on top of this, I've had a decade more of reading. So I've read more, like my stuff on Ulysses S.

25:39Grant, my stuff on Lincoln in this book, I think are much better now because I've read literally thousands of pages about their lives and the time that they lived. And all the while I was making, oh, that's a perfect obstacles away thing that I want to add in there. And so I just, yeah, I have these like, it's like comedians talk about tags. There was just like, which is like a thing at the end of a joke. There was just like a lot of little tags or little extra layers or an additional detail that I wanted to put in there. How did, so I remember in the prologue or the intro of this book, you specifically talk about or sort of anticipating a lot of people's, how they associated the word stoicism 10 years ago.

26:27Yes. And the work you've done since then to make that word mean something very different to a lot of people now. Yeah. And did that. I remember when, I remember when I was writing the book, the, the stoicism subreddit on Reddit had like 9 ,000 subscribers. And I think it has like a half a million now, some crazy number. And so, yeah, when I was riding the obstacles away, it was, hey, let me tell you about this thing called stoicism. And the task was much more along the lines of popularizing and making interesting a thing that a lot of people did not think was interesting. And then one of the tricky things about success is if you succeed, the original context in which you were operating is obliterated.

27:24And so the idea that stoicism was this unattractive or uninteresting thing to people no longer exists. And so I think that's something else I wanted to very much address in the book. I'm now obligated and able to give a fuller picture of the philosophy that I think is more urgently needed than it was then, if that makes sense.

27:57The feeling I feel most strongest from this experience, though, is just gratitude. The idea when I was writing The Obstacles the Way that I would still be writing 10 years later, that it would sell millions of copies, that it'd be in all these different languages, that I would have this platform, that stoicism would be as popular as it is. That was incomprehensible to me. I feel incredibly fortunate. And that's possible because every one of you that watched one of these videos that followed us on social media, that read the book, I wouldn't be here, the book wouldn't be here. Stoicism wouldn't be here without the collective.

28:31And also just the sheer amount of emails and feedback and sometimes not so nice criticism, but criticism that was not incorrect. All of that shaped and informed who I am as a person and also shaped and informed this new edition of the book. And I'm better for all of that and I appreciate it.

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