Could You Survive This? | Ask DS

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1:18Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

1:59Could you survive this? His father died when he was about three years old. He was raised by a single mother with an enormous fortune, and then at an alarmingly young age, he caught the eye of the emperor of Rome, a brilliant but twisted man in decline. He was groomed for absolute power, forced to come and live in Hadrian's palace, a place lived with spies and sycophants and capricious violence. At 18, he was made a junior magistrate in charge of Rome's financial affairs. Up and up he went the cursus honorum, the ladder of offices, until he put on the purple at age 39, becoming in an instant the most powerful man in the world.

2:39When we judge the rule of Marcus Aurelius, how often do we adjust for what an absolutely deranged childhood he endured? I want to snarl and show you how disturbed this has made me, Taylor Swift sings. You wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me. In fact, for the most powerful person in the world, for someone who has been performing in public since she was 11, Taylor Swift is pretty well adjusted. And the same goes for Marcus Aurelius. How did he not turn out to be a Nero or a Tiberius? It's almost unbelievable. The answer, of course, is Stoicism. Stoicism made the difference. The philosophy he got from his teachers, that copy of Epictetus loaned to him by Rusticus, the moral compass that is the four virtues, the spiritual practice of which meditations is a byproduct, seems to have saved him.

3:32It centered him. It guided him. But do you think it would have done the same for you? How long do you think you would have lasted in the asylum where they raised him? The real reason Marcus Aurelius wasn't corrupted by power, why he wasn't made insane by his surroundings, is because he worked hard at it, incredibly hard at it. He strove actively, daily, to not be Caesarified, to not be stained by that purple cloak that fortune put on his shoulders. It doesn't just happen. It doesn't matter how good you are. To survive success and fame and power to be virtuous in such a situation, one must make it the work of their life.

4:12And by the way, I think meditations is what we can use because you have Marcus Aurelius, you have the byproduct of that work, you have his worksheet effectively, and we can study that. We're so lucky. He didn't get to read meditations, but we do. The Gregory Hayes translation to me is the greatest. We've got paperbacks of that in the Daily Stoic store, but also the Daily Stoic store is the only place you can get the leather edition that we make here at Daily Stoic, which is of the Hays edition. I've just burned through so many copies over the years. I wanted something a bit more durable, whether it's your first time reading meditations or your 50th, there's always something you can take away from it.

4:52And I think you want a copy that will last and hold up under the trials you're going to subject it to. You can grab that at store.dailystoic.com. I'll link to it in today's show notes.

5:07Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, I do the little Q &A. It's my favorite thing. If I could only do Q &As in my talks, that's what I would do. Because a lot of times I have to give the same talk. I rarely answer the same questions twice. And I certainly never give the same answers twice. Because you can tell the person's coming at it from a different way, different perspective. You're I'm going to be in London, Dublin, Rotterdam, Toronto, and Vancouver here in November. I'd love for you to come see me, ryanholiday.net slash tour. That's where you grab tickets.

5:43Usually when I do events like this one that I was at in Salt Lake City back in June, I don't know how the people got there. They're there for the event and I'm a guest of the event, right? These are not necessarily my people. I think I have to win that crowd over. I have to connect with them. I have to figure out, like this was a financial group. So I had to figure out how do I orient stoicism to what they are most interested in. And so it doesn't seem like a record scratch with the rest of the speakers. But the talks that I'm doing in Europe and then in Canada, like you guys can come. You can grab tickets.

6:18There'll be stoicism fans. I'm not going to do my sort of basic, here's what stoicism is. Do you have any questions? I'm really looking forward to going like way in depth. And I think as part of the VIP thing, there's like a private Q &A beforehand. So again, that's at Ryan Holiday.net slash tour. And you can ask me questions and maybe they'll end up here on this podcast at some point. But in the meantime, here is me answering some financial questions, digging into the stoic relationship to money and wealth out in Salt Lake City at the Money Is Mastermind. And if you can't make it out to the talks, but you want to know more about the stoics and their relationship to wealth.

6:56Obviously, they had a more expansive definition of wealth and just like has accumulated a lot of money. We have a really cool course about this called The Wealthy Stoic, A Daily Stoic Guide to Being Rich, Happy, and Free. I'll link to that in today's show notes. And by the way, it is free with all our other courses if you sign up for Daily Stoic Life at dailystoiclife.com. So you have obviously written a ton of books. Yeah, probably too many. And you're continuing to write books. will you ever go off the topic of stoicism? Will you ever go into other genres? And is there any plans to do so? Well, I found out recently, I was talking to my publisher.

7:34And so my first two books were about marketing. And then I had this idea to write a book about an obscure school of ancient philosophy, which they were not that excited about, as you can imagine. And I found out later, my editor was telling me that they were like, we were just hoping you would get this stoicism thing out of your system and then write more marketing books. It's worked out well for both of us. But I did a work of narrative nonfiction a couple years ago called Conspiracy. It's being turned into a movie that I'm kind of excited about. And then I'm doing this book for George. So I kind of go where it takes me.

8:07And right now I'm in the middle of this four-book series. So I did Courage, Discipline, Just Did Justice. Now I have to finish Wisdom. And then once I sort of get through, that's the first time I've ever kind of thought of projects more than one in a row. I'll kind of come up for air and think about what I do next. But when I take on projects, one of the things I think about is like, how will this challenge me? How will this be different? What will I learn from doing it? And so, yeah, probably doing the same thing over and over again is not the direction I would keep going. Yeah. You've had a lot of success.

8:37It's been said that with every great success, there's been some sacrifice and oftentimes an intentional sacrifice. As you look back on your life and everything that you've intentionally done to get where you are, Are there any sacrifices that you look back on and you're proud of it? You're excited for the fact that you chose that path and it led you down this one. I thought the expression was behind every great fortune is a great crime. Yeah, that's true, too. No, yeah, there is. Says every Illinois politician. Yeah, there are sacrifices, of course. And I think one of the things I'm thinking about, like one of the cool things, there's some professions or some things and you're, you know, being a professional athlete is one.

9:18maybe being an investor's one where you're like or starting a company's one where there's like an expiration date on it like you're doing it to get to an exit or you're doing it to your body gives up on you and one of the things that i am trying to having to think about more as i've gotten older it's like what's cool about this job is you know a lot of the authors do their best work very late in life and you know it's not like a musician either where you're like okay sure you can keep touring, but like, we know you're not cool anymore. You know, you can do some, I mean, Michael Lewis is doing some of his best work.

9:54So like a lot of my favorite authors, David McCullough wrote this book about the Wright brothers at like 80, you know, they can do their best work at the end. And so if you want to get to the end, you got to figure out how to pace yourself and you also have to figure out how to do it sustainably. And so I think there was definitely a period of very great intensity as I sort of built my platform and developed as a writer and was trying to strike while the iron was hot. And I think as I'm thinking about it now, like this last one, I took an extra year on it. I'm trying to think about, okay, if you're going to do this until, you know, whenever you can't do it anymore, if you want that time to be in the distant future, you've got to take care of yourself and you also have to pace yourself.

10:37And so I think if there's been some sacrifices, is it's been doing it at kind of an unsustainable pace. And then now that I have the luxury of, you know, stopping and looking around, I go, okay, what do I want to keep? What do I not want to keep? I would argue most of the sacrifices were borne by people other than me. And so how do you do repairs there? How do you balance things out? You know, I'm thinking a lot about that. Yeah. I don't know a lot about your family. I know you have, obviously, you showed a picture of your wife. Do you have children? I do. I have two. I have a seven-year-old and a five-year-old.

11:08Okay. and as you're raising them, do you often think about some of these principles that you're writing about and how to actually like instill it into their lives and what that will, what that will, I mean, like I didn't come into this understanding or at least this belief and, and, you know, kind of study of stoicism until probably six or seven years ago. Yeah. And you wonder what it, what effect it has on a life that starts early. So what are you teaching and what, what effect do you think that'll have? That's, I think that's one of the most profound parts of being introduced to or coming to stoicism is you it hits you and it changes you it makes you better and you just go why didn't anyone tell me about this earlier right and you you just think about what you could have done if you'd known it in high school or whatever and so I do think about that and then I also think about there's no one that my kids want to hear it from less than me and so how do I how do I not turn them off from it early if you've seen the movie Gladiator, Mark Surrealis' kid doesn't turn out so good and seems to just intuitively reject all the things that his father stood for.

12:15So I'm somewhat sensitive to that. And I think it's more got to be like, how do you do it by example? But I wrote these two kids' books that have some of the stoic ideas in them. And I try to talk to my kids about them. But the other day, my son said to me, he was like, hey, Dad, what do you think the worst book in our bookstore is? And then I I started to answer and he goes, I mean, besides yours. So I got to slip it in when they're not, they're not, they're not looking. Do you sell more of your own books at your own bookstore? Cause people come there specifically for you. I do have my, a section of my own books.

12:50And sometimes it'll be funny. People walk in and go, you sure have a lot of this Ryan guys books. And, and so that's always funny, but yeah, we, we sell them there. I signed them. And that's one of the cool things about having your own bookstore is that, you know, when I walk into other bookstores, I go, where are my books? You know, and I never have to feel that in my own bookstore. I go, let's put these right in the front where everyone can see them. You have to pay for an end cap. You just get all the prime space. Exactly. Any businesses outside of publishing the bookstore that you're looking at or you've invested in or is there any, you know, kind of things on the horizon there?

13:27Yeah, my dad was a real estate agent. It was a police officer who made a bunch of money as a real estate agent and investor when I was a kid. So I'd always sort of been interested in that. I did a lot of that when I had my sort of corporate life. And then when I started writing, I always kind of wanted something that was very different and insulated from publishing. That, you know, if I got hit by a bus or, you know, my brain stopped working, I would have this other thing there. So I did a lot of that in my 20s, which was great, especially the real estate market. And then now, though, it's more of a tension of like, OK, I was sort of always doing it kind of like we're talking about this idea that this would stop at some point and it didn't stop.

14:08And so now I just have this other thing that takes up a lot of time. So my wife and I are spending a lot of time just sort of thinking about not just, hey, what is the best investment, but what is the best investment that gives us much freedom or time to do the other things? because you can end up finding something that's lucrative, but if it takes you away from enjoying the lucrative nature of it, then it's not that lucrative. So I've been working on that quite a bit. Very good. Thank you so much.

14:55in 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.

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