Break Through While You Still Can | Ask Ryan Holiday

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:14Ryan Holiday: Winter has a way of lulling us into bad habits and old vices. Like bears and hibernation, we're burrowed deep in our comfortable routines. We found our favorite spot on the couch, our go-to delivery meals, our perfectly temperature-controlled environments. We've mastered the art of avoiding the cold, the wind, the discomfort. They call this the velvet rut, and it's soft and pleasant, but it's still a rut. And yeah, after months of dark mornings and early sunsets, after trudging through slush and scraping ice off windshields, shields, it's natural to grow comfortable. It's reasonable to seek shelter in these comfortable patterns.

1:00Ryan Holiday: But the Stoics remind us that true growth requires resistance. Just as seedlings must break through the soil, we must break through and out these patterns. Nature doesn't stay dormant forever? Neither should we. The idea is that we move with the seasons, and we must face the brisk winds of change head on. And that's what the spring forward challenge that we do each spring with Daily Stoic is about. Not quick fixes, but it is about getting set for spring. And with 10 days of Stoic-inspired challenges, one per morning, the idea is that you'll clear away some of winter's accumulated habits, just as you would clear dead leaves from the garden.

1:48Ryan Holiday: You can plant new patterns that will grow and flourish throughout the year. Yeah, the world is crazy right now, but as Marcus Aurelius reminds us, these external circumstances don't define us. It's our response to them that does. And we have the power to transform challenges into opportunities for growth. Stop wandering about, Marcus says to himself in meditations, perhaps on the eve of a seasonal change like this one. He says, get busy with life's purpose. Toss aside your empty hopes. Get active in your own rescue. If you care for yourself at all, he says, do it while you can. This is the time.

2:30Ryan Holiday: Do it now. We'd love to have you join us and thousands of Stoics all over the world in the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. The idea is it's going to help you with anxiety and stress, how to be present, how to get after it, how to get active in your own rescue, as Mark's really said. So we'd love to have you join us, and we'd love to have you stop procrastinating. Break out, break free, get cleaning, challenge yourself. And you can sign up right now at dailystoic.com slash spring. We start in less than 24 hours. I will see you in there. I'm going to be doing it myself. We've got a special offer for podcast listeners.

3:06Ryan Holiday: 20 % off when you use code DSPOD20 at checkout. You can join me and thousands of other Stoics in the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. Just head over to dailystoic.com slash spring and enter code DSPOD20 to get 20 % off.

3:27Ryan Holiday: We all experience injuries, pain. And there's physical obstacles, things we can't do that hold us back. That is a part of life. But what we have ultimately is a choice about how we respond to those setbacks. And Built from Broken is an award-winning book from a corrective exercise specialist named Scott Hogan that helps you heal painful joints and rebuild your body stronger. Built from Broken arms you with knowledge and gives you practical recommendations for rebuilding your joints. One of the things they talk about in the book is how important movement variety is. It's one of the most critical aspects of healthy aging that just not enough people talk about, let alone implement.

4:07Ryan Holiday: And just by varying what you do, you can create healthy stressors that reinforce your joint integrity rather than eroding it. And to celebrate the launch of Built from Broken in stores nationwide, listeners get access to a couple of exclusive offers. If you visit saltwrap.com slash daily stoic to get your copy and download the full exercise video library for free, and you also get free access to the Built from Broken Guide to Regenerative Therapies that Scott wrote in partnership with a clinical advisory board of physical therapists and regenerative medicine practitioners. Second, use the code daily stoic at saltwrap.com to save 20 % off your first order of therapeutic nutrition formulas.

4:46Ryan Holiday: This book and these tools are references that you can turn to for the rest of your life to make your setbacks into comebacks. Look, I like home-cooked meals. I just don't like the process of getting all the stuff to then cook at home. I don't like having to think about dinner, and I'm like, when it's time for dinner, I want the dinner, like, pretty fast. But then I also want to eat well, and I like stuff that tastes good. That's like a pretty complicated set of needs there. And it actually fits perfectly with today's sponsor. And it's why we love HelloFresh. They take the mental load of what's for dinner off your to-do list.

5:22Ryan Holiday: HelloFresh makes it easy to do more home cooking with recipes that feel good and taste delicious night after night. They have more than 100 recipes every week. It doesn't matter what your allergies or preferences are. You can make something work. They've got three times the seafood with no upcharge. and you can even have guests over, make them grass-fed steak ribeyes or serve seasonal produce like pears and apples and asparagus. We love HelloFresh and I think you'll love it too. Just go to hellofresh.com slash stoic 10 FM to get 10 free meals and a free Zwilling knife, which is$145 value on your third box.

5:58Ryan Holiday: Offer is valid while supplies last. Free meals are applied as a discount on first box. New subscribers only varies by plan.

6:08Ryan Holiday: Hello there, Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. As you know, I love answering your questions, whether I get to see you in person, doing a bunch of talks. As I said, you can come see me in a bunch of American and Australian cities if you go to dailystokellab.com. But if you don't want to travel all the way to Australia, maybe we just sit down and talk about how to have a good spring. That's what we're going to be doing in the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. It starts on March 20th. So if you want to get in there and do that together, you should join at dailystoke.com slash spring.

6:43Ryan Holiday: But in the meantime, here's some questions that I answered last year during the Spring Forward Challenge. Maybe it'll help you think about what you ought to be doing going into the spring.

6:59This question is about today's challenge, which spoke to me the most. focus only on what we control but past wounds can really uh kind of bleed into the present and feel ever present you know for myself it's really personal i have a very um toxic mother i don't really have a great relationship with and an uninvolved father so like how can i apply stoic wisdom to like truly actually move forward instead of just, I guess, suppressing the pain. Because so often I really feel that I've moved past it, but then I come to find that I've not. Yeah. Well, that's rough. I'm sorry. I would say, yeah, we don't control that it happened.

7:46We don't control who we got assigned on this go around on the planet, but we control how we respond to it. We control whether we get help with it. We control whether we try to process it. We control whether we try to do better. We control all the things that we do after. So look, I don't think stoicism is just stuffing it down and pretending it didn't happen, but it's doing the work, whether that's with a therapist, whether that's with philosophy texts, whether that's just with a lot of long walks where you think and process and talk about things. To me, that's what stoicism is. There is a great line from Seneca where he says, we don't get to choose our parents, but we do get to choose whose children we're going to be.

8:32And the idea of saying, hey, this is who I biologically come from, but I'm going to have a clean break and find myself the descendant of someone or something else. I'm going to choose a different trajectory for my life. That's a big part of it. I don't think I would describe my childhood is anything quite like yours, but I think we all have issues from ours. And as I've tried to process and deal with mine, I'm trying to say, okay, for my own sake and for the sake of my kids, whose child am I going to be? What am I going to hail from? Who am I going to work with and talk to to sort of reparent myself so that I can go forward and have a better sort of healthier, more well-adjusted life?

9:17So good luck. And I think you're asking the right questions. Thank you so much. Like everyone has said, this has been really helpful. And you talked about serendipity earlier in this chat. And I can't remember which day it was, but Andrew said the quote, but one of the Stoic thought leaders said something to the effect of how if you follow all of your curiosity streams, you'll end up not really doing anything. I'm super paraphrasing and changing terms. And that has always been a huge pain point for me because I think my broad curiosity is probably like at the core of my personality. And I'm a writer and it goes very slowly because I go down all these rabbit holes and I'm interested in everything and I want to do everything all at once.

10:07And I guess I'm embracing discipline and staying focused this year. And it's it's born fruit. But I'm still curious about stoic, informed advice for actually finding that balance and not letting your life become rigid while still being productive and disciplined. No, it's a great question. One of the things I try to remind myself when I'm working on a book, because there's all these things that I want to include or all these things that I'm interested in, all these things that connect to it. I try to remind myself that this isn't the only book that I'm going to get to do. right and that that the book that i'm doing here is about this and i have to for for the sake of of clarity of argument but also for the sake of it reaching and resonating with an audience i have to be disciplined about what that is for this brief period of time that i'm working on it and then i'll go to the next one and the next one and the next one and so so sometimes it's if we feel like well i'm just not going to be able to get to it or if we feel like i'm going to try to get it all in, we're going to be constrained.

11:12But if we say, hey, for now, I'm focused on this. And then later, I'm going to focus on that. It allows us to kind of go, OK, I'm not actually closing any doors. I'm just putting this stuff over here for a minute. And so there's so many things that I want to read about. There's so many things that I'm fascinated by. I would definitely default on the side of being more curious than less curious. I think curiosity is great. But I just have to remind myself right now, my focus is this. And then as soon as I finish, my reward for finishing is I get to go over here and get fascinated by this other thing.

11:45And so to kind of just have, hey, this is my deep dive into this. Then I'm going to do a deep dive into this. And then I'm going to do a deep dive into that. But great question. Hi, Ryan. The time of your course was quite gratuitous for me. My divorce papers came in on Wednesday and I started the course on Friday. Oh, sorry. No, it was a great opportunity to look inwards and to make much more of the challenges about my emotional state or what I'm going through. I'm very familiar with the works and familiar with the books and familiar with the resources, but I'm still feeling lost. I'm still feeling that the next few steps that I take are the most important ones I'm going to take.

12:25I'm still not sure if I have a direction. And, you know, I want to thank everybody here on the call who have been so kind and so forward. When I send messages on the platform, I found all your comments and messages to be very helpful. Well, that's one of my favorite part about these challenges, watching the sort of community come together and people sort of help each other. And I know I learn stuff from the chats also. So wait, walk me through why you feel like you're struggling directionally. I feel like I'm at a fork. I feel like the next path of which I choose will be the one that defines me for the rest of my life.

13:03I feel like I have so many options in front of me that I'm paralyzed by the choice. Well, that might be something you're inflicting on yourself a little bit in the sense that you're making this kind of an all or nothing choice, when in fact, it's one choice of thousands, millions of choices that you will have to make in the future. So I might think about what's the best choice I can make here now and understanding not only do I have many subsequent choices to make, but I can also choose to remake this choice, right, to come back to this crossroads again. I think sometimes we paralyze ourselves with needing to get everything perfectly right.

13:38We raise the stakes on things. We act like this is a matter of life and death. And usually it is not. Usually our decisions are much less permanent than they feel in the moment. So I'd probably, I try to lower the stakes here. That's one of the things I think about. Albert, you want to go? Oh, thank you, Ryan. Things that I really enjoyed in this challenge went well, and a special thank you. I was very depressed after the election with the turnout. Well, not very depressed, but I let the external thing, it wasn't a good stoic affect me. So I bought the Daily Dad, and I bought it for my son-in-law and other people.

14:13But I got adult kids, and I'm trying to be like Zeno and use two ears and one mouth in general of everybody I meet. you know? But how can I talk to my kids? Because I have a son who I think is in pain, you know? How do you talk to your adult children without putting on air? Is it something that I need to work on? No, no, look, I don't have any experience talking to adult children yet, but I guess I am an adult child. And I think your instinct about listening more than you talk is great. And so, you know what I would do? I would ask more questions. The more questions you can ask, probably the more you'll get.

14:52Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

15:30To the me I used to be, before texting 988. When another argument with mom felt like the end of the world, and school got too stressful, I felt alone. But when I texted 988, a real person texted back. someone listened without judgment. I'm still here, and I'm stronger than I thought. We hear you. Call, text, or chat 988. It's free, confidential, and here for you 24-7. Brought to you by the New York State Office of Mental Health.