Can You Do It With A Broken Heart? | Anything Can Be An Advantage

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1:03Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

1:44Can you do it with a broken heart? It's one thing to get up there and perform. It's one thing to show your kids a wonderful day. It's one thing to go make the sale. It's one thing to put in a full 12-hour shift. It's another thing to do it after a wrenching custody handoff. It's another to do it as you're grieving. It's another to do it when you're filled with shame. It's another to do it when you feel totally alone, terribly alone. Stoicism is not the absence of emotion. We have stories of Marcus Aurelius crying, multiple in fact. We have incredibly thoughtful essays from Seneca on grief and loss.

2:20My favorite translation is in The Painted Porch. I'll link to that. The Stoics made beautiful works of art. They wrote poetry. They loved the theater. These were people that felt, no question. But they also understood that life, especially leadership, requires being able to balance these emotions with the responsibilities and duties that each of us have. Taylor Swift sings in I Can Do It With A Broken Heart. We can imagine Marcus Aurelius trying to hit his marks, trying to perform the public duties of the emperor, even as a plague devastated Rome. even as he grieved the loss of another one of his children, even as he was suffering from his own debilitating health issues.

2:59We have to process these emotions to be sure. We may also have to put them aside for a second because our children are depending on us, because we've got to go make our living, because we made a commitment, because the world is counting on us. Life doesn't care if you have a broken heart, only that we hit our marks.

3:28August 16th in the Daily Stoic. I'm holding that here in my hands right now. This is a cloth-bound hardcover. I've got the leather edition in the Daily Stoic store if you're looking for a gift. But our message today comes from Marcus Aurelius. This is 835. He says, Just as the nature of rational things has given to each person their rational powers, So it also gives us this power. Just as nature turns to its own purpose, any obstacle or any opposition sets in place in the destined order and co-ops it so every rational person can convert any obstacle into raw material for their own purpose. The entry is about the basketball player Muggsy Bogues.

4:10At five feet, three inches tall, Muggsy Bogues was the shortest player to ever play professional basketball. Throughout his career, he was snickered at, underestimated, and counted out. But Moog succeeded by turning his height into the very thing that made him nationally known. Some people looked at his size as a curse, but he saw it as a blessing. He found advantages contained within it. In fact, on the court, small size has many advantages, speed and quickness, the ability to steal the ball from an unsuspecting and significantly taller player, to say nothing of the fact that players just plain underestimated him.

4:39Could this approach not be useful in your own life? What things do you think have been holding you back, but in fact can be a hidden source of strength? You know, I'm working on a 10-year anniversary edition of The Obstacle is the Way right now, and I have a chapter about this. And the story I tell is the story of Tony Hawk, who is one of the greatest skateboarders of all time. But he was also very early to skateboarding. He was one of the youngest kids out there. And he was very, very small. And as a result of being small, not very heavy. And so he had trouble. He would talk about getting up and out of the bowl.

5:15And I'll read this little passage to you here because I like it a lot and I've been thinking about it a lot recently. I write that the skateboarder Tony Hawk began his professional career at age 14, essentially when he was still a child. He was so much smaller than the other skater, so small generally that getting air off the ramp was difficult. This was frustrating, difficult, unfair even. But only when Hawk accepted that he simply could not do what the bigger skaters could naturally do, easily do, was able to invent his own way of doing it, ollieing as he left the lip of the pool to compensate.

5:47And this little innovation did more than help Tony Hawk level the playing field. It revolutionized the entire sport. I go on to say that it doesn't always feel this way, but the constraints in life can be a good thing, especially if we accept them and let them direct us. They push us to places and to develop skills that they otherwise have never pursued. Would we rather have everything? Of course, but that isn't up to us. It's easy to observe that people who are deprived of one of their senses often find that their others are heightened. But imagine being Thomas Edison and losing your hearing as a young boy.

6:20Imagine actually being Helen Keller, who was deaf and blind. They had to wrestle with this cruel deprivation first, come to terms with it, and then bravely move through life without them. Acceptance often feels like resignation to us, especially when we're young and ambitious and determined. But it is the first part getting better. If we looked at someone who took traffic signals personally, we would judge them insane. If we met someone who was fighting gravity or the sunset, we'd pity them. Life deals us unavoidable, inalterable things. It tells us to come to a stop here or that some intersection is blocked, that a particular road has been rerouted through an inconvenient detour.

6:58We can't argue or yell this problem away. We have to accept it. But once we accept it, then we can find the advantage in it. We can find what we can do despite it. We can find what we can do because of it, right? We can find the advantage. Anything can be an advantage when we co-opt it, when we convert the obstacle into the raw material for our own purpose. That's the idea in the obstacle is the way that is the essence of stoicism. We don't control what happened. We don't control how we were born. We don't control the circumstances we're in, but we control how we respond to it. We control what we do about it.

7:33We control who we become despite it. we decide who we become because of it.

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