BONUS | 6 Stoic Rules of Arete (Excellence)

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1:26Ryan Holiday: These are six stoic strategies for a life of erite. That is to say excellence. Number one, you have to seek out discomfort. You're not going to grow. You're not going to learn doing things the way that you're comfortable with, keeping them the way that they are. In meditations, Mark Spruillis talks about practicing holding the reins in his non-dominant hand. He wanted to make himself uncomfortable. Get out of his element on purpose because that's how you get better. Number two, focus on process, not on outcomes. This sounds contradictory. Don't you want to win? Don't you want to make great stuff?

1:58Ryan Holiday: Yes, of course you do, but you don't get there by focusing on that. It's insane, the Stoics would say, to tie your well-being, your sense of success to things that are outside of your control. Instead, what a Stoic does is put your ass in the chair, do the work, you assemble a life, you assemble a project. Mark Ceruleus says in meditations, action by action, doing that thing in front of you, he says no one can stop you from that. Three, this is really important, ask for help. Mark Sarelius compares us to a soldier storming a wall. He says, if you've fallen and you have to ask a comrade for help, so what?

2:31Ryan Holiday: What I love in meditations is all the people that Marcus Aurelius thanks at the beginning. People who helped him, people who he learned from, people whom without he would not have become who he was. It's wonderful to ask for help. You absolutely should. Don't be afraid to ask for help. That's how you get better. That's how you grow. That's how you become the person you are capable of being. Four, ego is the enemy. It's impossible to learn that which you think you already know, Epictetus says. Zeno talked about how conceit prevented us from growing and improving. Ego focuses on all the things that are great about us.

3:03Ryan Holiday: Humility focuses on where we need to get better, what we don't know. Again, that's what Socrates was focused on. Not what he knew, but how little he knew. And in doing so, he got better and he grew. Five, embrace failure. The only way to grow, the only way to get better is to fail, is to try things and to learn. Mark Smuless talks about how we're going to be jarred by circumstances in life. We're going to be knocked off our block. But excellence is how quick you can get back to it. It's to celebrate behaving like a human being, which is going to mean failure. Elite performance is a game of failure.

3:34Ryan Holiday: It's messing up, it's failing, it's setbacks more often than you succeed. And it's how determined, how committed you are, how quickly you are able to get back that separates the winners from the losers. And that leads us to the sixth and final one. The obstacle is the way. If you are only able to handle circumstances going your way, you're not going to go very far. Instead, what a stoic does is turn what happened to it into fuel. We say, hey, this is training me. This is helping me. This is making me get better. How can I learn from this? How can I grow from this? What is this circumstance giving me a chance to prove and to practice?

4:09Ryan Holiday: is. Mark Sarela said that everything that happens to us is an opportunity to practice virtue. Everything that happens to us is a chance to practice excellence, a chance to get better, chance to try new ways of doing things, a chance to challenge ourselves. This is an occasion we can rise to meet. That's what the greats do. They use it all and so must you. Chicago knows Ford. At Mercado Ford Chicago, we are Chicago. You'll find over 400 new and pre-owned vehicles, giving you one of the largest Ford inventories in Chicagoland. From hardworking trucks to everyday commuters, we've got the Ford built for your life.

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