Can You Embrace The Challenge Like They Did? | How Stoics Develop a Strong Mindset

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1:59On 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.

2:18The fact that America exists is the ultimate argument that Stoicism is not apathy and that philosophy is not mere theory. Because without Stoicism, it's possible there would be no revolution, no constitution, no Bill of Rights, and no Fourth of July. Thomas Jefferson kept a copy of Seneca on his nightstand. George Washington staged a reproduction of a play about Cato at Valley Forge in the winter of 77 and 78 to inspire the troops, having first read the Stoics himself as a teenager. Patrick Henry cribbed lines from that same play that we now credit to him. Give me liberty or give me death, he said.

3:01John Adams, Ben Franklin, all the founders were well versed in the works of the Stoics. It's partly what gave them the courage to found a new nation against such incredible odds. It's partly what set up the principles that formed that nation and changed the world. At the core of the American experiment was liberty. At the core of Stoicism, we have not only a love of freedom, but the counterbalancing virtues to that freedom, justice, duty, self-control, honor, selflessness. These are the traits that are required not only in those dark days of revolution as bloody footprints from starving soldiers marked the snows in New Jersey and New York, but also the traits needed equally now in moments of prosperity and plenty, division and distraction.

3:49So today, while you're grilling and relaxing with friends, remember that the comfort you enjoy now grew out of a philosophy that was made to embrace discomfort and to do the right thing, whatever the costs. Remember that the American victory over the British came first because a group of American Stoics first found victory over themselves. Because for all their Stoic resignation, these men and women also deeply believed in their own agency and their own power. Seneca said, most powerful is he who has himself in his own power. The founding fathers built a country on that very foundation. They employed the Stoic virtues like a hammer and a chisel like a saw and a nail to master their passions, divisions, tempers, interests, and strive to be something better, something more than they were remotely capable of being in the years of their colonial youth.

4:45That wasn't easy. It wasn't free. But they embraced the challenge and challenge us today to do the same.

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6:00Life isn't fair. Life is unpredictable. Pace of change is merciless. The amount of adversity and difficulty that can happen is endless. And a stoic has to cultivate not just the physical strength to be able to withstand all that, but the mental strength, the fortitude to be able to not just survive it, but thrive inside of it. In letters from a stoic, Seneca talks about how he pities the person who has never been through adversity because they haven't had a chance to prove themselves. Right. And so the reason we push ourselves physically, why we get in the cold plunge, why we get up early, why we take on things that other people say are impossible or difficult is to test ourselves.

6:43It's to see what we're capable of. Right. Some of the adversity of life is going to be outside of our control. But it's only in seeking out adversity that's in our control that we train ourselves, that we develop the muscles, the skills, the confidence to know, hey, I can handle this. Mark Shrevely says, how will you meet the adversity of tomorrow? He says, with the same weapons that you had today. You have to cultivate and sharpen those weapons. You have to build those muscles. And you do it by seeking out adversity, doing hard things, not on accident, but on purpose.

7:17One of the great Stoics, Zeno, said that reading books is a way to converse with the dead. When Zeno was a young man, he went to the Oracle of Delphi and he got a prophecy. He said, you will become wise when you begin to have conversations with the dead. And he ultimately realizes that what the Oracle means is that by reading, we are able to talk to people who lived very long ago. If you think about Mark Surrelius' Meditations, one of the books that I lean on, you're getting direct access to the brain of a man who lived 2 ,000 years ago. Tolstoy's A Calendar of Wisdom, which I read every morning.

7:49That's a guy who died over a hundred years ago, but he's preparing something for you to think about and read every single day. We become stronger, we become better, we become wiser when we have conversations with the dead.

8:05Perspective is, of course, everything, right if you've ever been stuck in traffic in los angeles it was a miserable annoying experience an ugly bit of modernity but if you've ever flown over los angeles at night you've seen that same traffic and all of a sudden it's beautiful this sort of interconnected living organism that is humanity i'm on this trip right now with my family we just had all these different delays all this inclement weather that on the one hand we could have said oh this ruins the trip instead we said this is an adventure this is an experience mentally tough mentally resilient people they manage to find the right perspective they manage to grab the right handle on the situation right do you see what's good in it do you see what it allows you to do do you see the way inside the obstacle or do you see where you're stuck where there's the impediment where you can't do something there's a lot that happens in our life that's out of our control but what is in our control is the perspective we choose to take, the lens at which we choose to look at things.

9:04Epictetus says every situation has two handles, right? One will bear weight, the other won't. So what are you gonna grab this by? How are you gonna choose to see it? How are you going to choose to try to carry it? It's the same thing, a different perspective. Life is like that. We can look at it one way or we can choose to look at it another way. We can choose to look at something as an obstacle or we can choose to look at something as an opportunity. We can see chaos if we look close. We can see order if we look from afar. We can see disadvantage if we look at it one way. We can see advantage if we look the other.

9:38We can see obstacle from this perspective, opportunity from the other.

9:47It's a little bit counterintuitive, but one of the best ways to increase our mental capacity, our mental toughness, is by doing hard physical things. Seneca says we treat the body rigorously so that it is not disobedient to the mind. We're practicing showing our body who's in charge. We're building the muscle of the mind. So we learn that when we think we can't do something, that's not always true. That we have the power to outthink, to outcreate, to push past the limitations or the warning signs, and do things that a lesser version of ourselves wouldn't think possible. Steven Pressfield talks about this, Martin Luther King actually talked about this idea that there's sort of a north and a south in each of us.

10:27And that we're in sort of a war against the lower self, that the higher self is battling to surpass, to transcend the lower self. And I think when you treat the body rigorously, when you create a strong and tough mind, you're winning that battle and that makes you so much better.

10:49there's things that are up to us and there's things that are not up to us epictetus one of the great stoics he says that the key task in life is separating matters into two categories the stuff that's up to us and the stuff that's not you can't be mentally tough or mentally resilient if you spend all of your mental energy resenting arguing with blaming regretting the things that have happened that are outside of your control that weren't your fault where fault it no longer matters just as you can't be physically tough you can't be physically resilient if you are throwing yourself over and over again at brick walls that you do not have the strength or power or control or ability to change you have to know what's up to you and what's not up to you this is the serenity prayer you have to have the wisdom to know what is up to you and what isn't.

11:42You have to have the courage to face what is up to you. You have to have the serenity and the peace and the stillness to accept what is not up to you.

11:54The Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield once pointed out, he said, look, astronauts are not braver than other people. They're just meticulously prepared. Courage isn't this thing that you magically have. It's something that you have to cultivate. The athlete that hits the winning shot, that's not just from raw bravery. That's from the fact that they have practiced it over and over and over again. They know what they're capable of. I've said before, I don't believe in myself. I have evidence. Courage, confidence comes from that evidence. You have to cultivate it. And you cultivate it by doing hard things, by pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, right?

12:31By not listening to that voice that says, you can't do it. It's hard. What if it doesn't work? You cultivate courage, as Seneca was saying, by treating the body rigorously, by pushing past those boundaries, by incrementally making yourself a little bit better and a little bit braver. We can't just hope to be brave when it counts. We have to cultivate that bravery. We have to cultivate that courage slowly and steadily over time in the work that we do on ourselves.

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