Can You Believe We Can Do This? | Only Fools Rush In

0:05Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com.

1:09to solve, we could do so much better. We just know it. And yet the Stoics remind us that every situation has two handles, that there is more than one way to look at everything. When Dr. Lori Santos was on the Daily Stoic podcast, you should know who she is. Her happiness course at Yale is one of the most popular in the 300-year history of the school. It's a must-listen episode. She lamented the problems with today's society, and then drawing on that exact exercise from Epictetus, she noted that human beings do manage to cooperate at a level that essentially no other species has ever managed. Consider a group of other predators, she pointed out, locked in a metal tube called an airplane for several hours.

1:52Think of the blood bat. And of course, remember that they could not have invented airplanes or the incredibly complex international organizations that manage air travel. So yeah, yeah, we could do better. We could use more bipartisanship and neighborliness and cooperation, and it is our stoic duty to model that behavior as individuals. But human society also deserves some credit. Modern society deserves some credit, too. For all the problems and failures of the pandemic, Marcus Aurelius' Rome did much worse in every single way during the Antonine Plague. For all the failures of our modern politicians, the founding fathers steeped in classical virtue you could not have even imagined the international allies and coordination we take for granted today.

2:36Nor were they capable of eradicating slavery and other injustices that we have rightfully addressed. We are doing better than it feels sometimes. So let us marvel at the cooperation that is possible, considering the flawed and petty humans that depend on it. Let us be grateful for the problems we have solved. Let us embrace and build the connections and kindness that is there. And do listen to the episode with Laurie Santos. It's really good. Let me just bring you a little chunk of it, and then I'll link to the rest of it in today's show notes. Worth downloading and listening to for sure. It is amazing that we get to be in one of the few species that all that happens is somebody says a nasty thing to them by the attendant.

3:15That we can, by and large, cooperate and clothe with each other. So even in the O 'Hare terribleness, you can find these moments of awe. But as we were just saying, it's hard. And it's hard in part because our mind is built with this negativity bias. We instantly go to the terrible things. It takes no work whatsoever to find like how mad I am about O 'Hare. The flight's delayed. Right. But it takes some work to notice the neutral stuff or the good stuff. But this is what I think that the kind of training and the practice is about. Right. Is that you build up the ability to do that better and better.

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5:14That's human with two N's dot com slash stoic for an extra 15 % off with code stoic at checkout. We just took our kids to an outdoor performance, the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

5:56My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for good inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It Over the Holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr.

6:33Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events.

6:52Only fools rush in. This is today's entry in the Daily Stoic. A good person is invincible, Epictetus says. in Discourses 3.6, for they don't rush into contests in which they aren't the strongest. If you want their property, take it. Take also their staff, profession, and body. But you will never compel what they set out for, nor trap them in what they should avoid. For the only contest the good person enters is that of their own reasoned choice. How can such a person not be invincible? And then the entry is, one of the most fundamental principles of martial arts is that strength should not go against strength.

7:32That is, don't try to beat your opponent where they are strongest. But for some reason, that's exactly what we try to do when we undertake some impossible task we haven't bothered to think through, or we let someone put us on the spot, or we say yes to whatever comes our way. Some people think that choosing your battles is weak or calculating, but how could reducing the amount of times we fail or minimize the needless injuries inflicted on us be weak? How's that a bad thing? As the saying goes, discretion is the better part of valor. Stokes call it reasoned choice. That means be reasonable. Think hard before choosing and make yourself unbeatable.

8:06A book I've recommended many, many times, I sell it here at The Painted Porch, is Zero to One by Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel says the whole point of business in life is to find where you have a monopoly, where you're the only one doing that thing. There's another book that I rave about that we carry here in the store called Blue Ocean Strategy. There's another one called Blue Ocean Shift that I actually did the marketing for. But the idea is red oceans is where there's lots of competition. That means being like everyone else, wanting the things that everyone wants, focusing on what's out of your control like everyone else.

8:37It's a far better thing to focus on what is in your control, on being you and your unique self. And the Stoics actually have a lot about this, right? Agrippinous, we talk about in Lives of the Stoics, he says, I want to be the red thread in the sweater, not like the other threads. I want to stand up. And that's the idea. Epictetus says, walk alone, right? Look around you, be who you are. To me, what he's saying is that when you try to be like someone else, you lose. When you want the things that other people want, you lose. When you enter something where you are trying to be like someone or something that you're not supposed to be, you lose.

9:20But when you are yourself, when you stand for what you stand for, When you do what you know is right, that's when you win, even if you, quote unquote, lose. There's an interview I was reading with the architect, Frank Gehry, and he would say when he was talking to architects who were just starting out, he'd get them to all get out a piece of paper. And he would say, write your signature on this paper. And then he'd spread them out and have the whole class looking up. And he'd say, they all look different. That's you. That's you. So stay with that forever. And I think that's what Epictetus is saying here.

9:58You are a unique person. You have a totally unique set of DNA and experiences and values, and you are that red thread. So don't make yourself like the others. Don't sell out, right? When you stick to who you are, when you're true to that, you win no matter what. You have a monopoly on you. Don't give that monopoly away. Don't forfeit it. Don't lose it. Another rendering of that Epictetus quote, he says, you can always win if you only enter competitions where winning is up to you. When your focus, as Mark Cirilli says, on what other people say or do, on getting approval, on having certain gatekeepers accept you or open things up to you, well, that's when you have set yourself up to be defeated.

10:46And even if you win, you've still lost in some sense that you've given up something that was uniquely you and uniquely yours. I think that's a shame. And so that's what I want to leave you there. Stick with what's up to you. Stick with who you are. Go where you have that monopoly. Competition is for losers, as Peter Thiel said. So go where you're a winner.

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