Do This. It’s Enough. | Ask Ds

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2:26welcome 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 we're 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. But thank you for listening. And we hope this is of use to you.

3:12do this it's enough marcus aurelius didn't just study philosophy when he was young he didn't just pick a set of beliefs and stick with him no to him philosophy was a lifelong study a process that he committed to that's why even as an old man he was seen famously headed off to attend the lectures from Sextus the philosopher. And while this certainly made him quite educated and quite smart, we can also imagine something else happening after so many years of reading and discoursing and meditating. What undoubtedly happened is that as he got older, the more he learned, the closer he came to understanding Socrates' humility, the sense that the more one learns, the less certain they are, they know.

3:52As John Adams, detailed in David McCullough's amazing biography, wrote in his own old age, you are not singular in your suspicions that you know but little. The longer I live, he said, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know. Yet Adams, like Marcus, still found himself returning to a set of ageless universal principles. They found themselves boiling things down to their essence into real and practical epithets for the self, as Marcus called them. Adams himself came up with just three commands, which he passed on down to his granddaughter, Caroline.

4:28Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly. This is enough, he said. My task is to be good, Marcus Aurelius wrote. The more you learn, the longer you live, the more you will understand that that is your job too. And doing that is more than enough.

4:50Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. If you listen to my Sunday episode back in the fall, I had this crazy couple of days where I flew down to LA. I interviewed Arnold Schwarzenegger. I drove up to Ojai, California. I had dinner with a former podcast guest and friend, the comedian Pete Holmes. Then I did a talk for this amazing group called Mastermind Talks. Jason Gaynard and his wife, Candice, I have known them since they started Mastermind Talks. I went before my book, Growth Hacker Marketing, came out for the first time. I went the second time when Obstacle is coming out.

5:27I've been many times over the years. He's been awesome to me. So I did a long Q &A there, which is what I'm going to bring you a chunk of today. Then I went back down, did an event with Robert Greene, flew home for the night, then flew to Seattle to do another event with Robert Greene. So I told that whole story about how you sort of stay stoic and calm amidst a crazy, overwhelming travel schedule. So that was me talking about it. If you want to hear me in the middle of that craziness, that's where I am in today's episode. I did about an hour, hour and a half Q &A with a bunch of these interesting entrepreneurs from all over the world.

6:04Some are authors, some are in e-commerce, some are influencers, some are fitness people, some run call centers. They're just all sorts of interesting entrepreneurs, really nice folks. And if you haven't been to Mastermind Talks, you should. I think they're taking a break this year, but I'm sure you can get on the wait list for next year. If you're thinking about coming, thanks to Jason for sending over the audio of this. And thanks to everyone in the audience who asked some very interesting questions. I'll be bringing pieces of that over the next couple months. But I'll give you a chunk of some Stoic-themed questions right now.

6:39The world is full of tours. But you don't choose a Toyota truck to follow the beaten path. You choose it to find the places in between. The detours, where each adventure pulls you toward the next. And wrong turns to not right. So why would you ever take a tour when you could take a detour? Toyota Trucks.

7:17Hi, Ryan. Great talk today. And what I was hearing throughout a lot of it was a message of authenticity and just kind of being like your weird authentic self. Yes. And I also heard you talk about partnership revenue, you know, and advertising income as an influencer myself. I realize that that's a great deal of how you survive as an influencer, how you pay your bills, or at least how you pay your employees bills. And, uh, and affiliates and partners, a lot of times don't like the weird, like they, they want to know that I'm going to write, for example, or do a video or a podcast about biohacking or nutrition or something like that.

8:05And when I wake up in the morning and I just want to be my weird authentic self. And I think, gosh, I can do the kevin kelly 1000 true fans thing and if i talk about whatever i want to talk about people are gonna come along for the ride sure so i'll talk about god or education or family or parenting or freaking like music or pickleball and i've started to do that a lot more over like the past year and a half and partnership revenue has plummeted affiliates are dropping like flies like all the people that would normally want me to be an influencer are running for the hills because i'm being my weird authentic self.

8:38And whereas I don't care. Cause like I, I can live on like 60 ,000 bucks a year, like a King in Spokane, Washington. I've got like, you know, 27 employees and my partnerships manager is like driving home in the evening to be with her baby and her two-year-old thinking, gosh, how am I going to feed my family tonight? Cause Ben's talking about like pickleball instead of, you know, what this partner expects him to be talking about. Have you ever thought about how to deal with that? Yeah, it's a tension for sure. I mean, I try to go like, do I own the platform or does the platform own me? Right. And so it would be a shame if success, you know, creating whatever it is that you do.

9:19It's a shame that success is like you then don't get to say what you want or what gets you excited. At the same time, if you drive the audience away, then, you know, that doesn't work either. So, you know, you sort of, you understand what the audience is interested in, but you can't be captured by the audience. You also can't, you know, there's a, I think that's what he was saying in the Iron Maiden quote I was talking about. So you also have a deal with the audience. They're like, this is what we came here for. And so I think there's a tension. I don't know, like, the perfect way to do it. I try to create additional channels where I talk about the thing.

9:56So it's like parenting is obviously a big part of my life because I have kids. So if I hijack Daily Stoic and make it the Stoic parent, well, that's a little self-absorbed because not everyone has kids. And so they're like, this isn't for me anymore. So I spun off a second thing. Like I have my personal socials, which a lot of people follow that also follow Daily Stoic, but not all of them. So I try to create separate channels. And then I go, you know, what's the show we're putting on here? What's the show we're putting on here? What's the show we're putting on here? But I would say one thing about affiliates, advertisers, et cetera, which I have found is like, I tried to think about like, okay, I have this space at the bottom of the emails.

10:40There's the pre-roll or mid-roll stuff on the podcast. There's all this space, right? And that's clearly worth something to these people. They're not, they're buying a space for$100. They're clearly making more than$100 or they wouldn't be paying for it, right? So there's a multiple. That space is worth more than what people are paying for it. Just the advertisers capturing that. And so one of the things that I got into earlier at Daily Stoic, not wanting to do a lot of advertising, is just making stuff that I thought the audience would be interested in and then using the space to sell my own things.

11:15So we have challenge coins and we have stuff that we make. And so it's like I sell the leftover inventory or obviously what you see with Substack, some of these other platforms where the people are paying for the content itself. And then, you know, they're subsidizing the people who are just getting it for free. And so I think if you create multiple revenue streams or ways of monetizing the stuff, then you're first off harder to cancel or harder to – you're more resilient if one kind of market crashes and then another is popular. So I think having that robustness is also good. Hi. Thank you so much for feeding us.

11:58Thank you. I want to ask you a question. Every publisher and agent knows right now you're bankable. So what was the thing that made the publisher your very first book say, yeah? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, it was sort of a trendy of the moment thing. That's why they were excited about it. That's a bias of publishing is they want like what's popular right now. I had a plan for how I was going to segue from that of the moment popularity to what I wanted to write about. But there was a couple of things. I had a platform that it wasn't enormous, but I had like a small email list where people really liked my stuff.

12:37And then I also had a big network of other authors who were vouching for me. I've worked for all these different authors. And so I had I if I didn't have a track record selling my own writing, I had a track record that I knew how to move books. Right. And so I'm showing that, hey, this person understands that just having an idea. is like 20 % of the thing the publisher is buying. You know, they wanted, they knew I could deliver a book because I'd been a research assistant, right? They knew that I understood book marketing and they knew I understood marketing in general and that I had people who would help me in that process.

13:18So showing that, yeah, you're not this sort of lone wolf that no one's heard of before, you know, that you're like, hey, this is what I'm bringing with me. Hi, question. So one of the things that really resonated with me in your talk was like playing the long game and finding that blue ocean. But also I find like with finding the blue ocean, there's this moment of like, hey, wow, this is paradise. Or also like, is this shark infested and everyone knew about it and I just didn't know. Yes. So what is your process in grounding within yourself of like knowing you're playing the long game versus just being stubborn and like acting out of fear of like some cost?

13:52Right. Yeah. It could be that people have already, you know, checked that space out and it's a dead end. I think, so I found something interesting with stoicism So there were not very many books that First off, the Stoics weren't selling particularly well And then there really weren't any books about stoicism that were selling well I saw it both as a space that, you know, having been so affected by the work I knew it would work for, like I knew it deserved a bigger audience At the same time, I knew from whenever I tried to talk to people about it that it was like immediate disinterest. Like the word stoic in English is about as negative a connotation as you could get.

14:33Philosophy is about as impractical and inaccessible to people as an academic concept could be, maybe other than physics, right? So I bumped into that wall a bunch of times. So I understood that the reason that it wasn't popular was because of these things. So when I went to write a book about stoicism, and my first book was The Obstacles Away, the word stoic maybe appears like three times in that whole book. And most of those are at the end of the book. Like it's a book about solving problems through which stoic philosophy is a lens for doing it. So it's not a book about stoic philosophy. It became one later when it fit into this sort of larger universe and then the thing was popular.

15:21But I understood that that's what it was up against. And every book that I've done since, I've started from that frame of reference, which is like, number one, people don't like books. Number two, there are already a lot of books out there that people do read, you know, like people don't read new books. Like, so how do you get them to care about this thing? Understanding that that's like a big uphill climb. So it's funny now that my books have worked, obviously, and I see the proposals, people are like, you know, this is the next obstacle is the way I've seen other people try to sort of get in that space.

15:51And with few exceptions, most of the other books about Stoic philosophy, ones written by smarter people than me, you know, more qualified people than me, have not sold particularly well. And I would say largely, it's not that the books aren't good. Some of them are quite good. It's that they're just assuming that people are interested in this topic and actually the same sort of obstacles and reservations exist. And they don't, they just like, I'm a nerd about philosophy. I would read all those books, but I am in a small minority. And so I think a lot of times people see a big market and they go, no one's taken advantage of that.

16:25And they don't think of why it's been left fallow or ignored. And if you can sort of step out of your own skin and think about what people's hesitations have been, you know, what are the impediments, like what are the, what are the barriers? And then whatever you're doing is designed to get over that. I think that's a really important way to break it. You don't just go, oh, this is uninhabited. It's like, gets uninhabited for a reason. And how is it going to go differently for me?

17:04Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode. my family owns a 2023 toyota 4runner and honestly it's my favorite vehicle that i've ever owned around town it's smooth and reliable but where it really shines is on our trips into the back country we've taken it on backpacking adventures to colorado and new mexico loaded up with gear and never had to think twice about whether it could handle the terrain that's what toyota trucks are built for off-road confidence rugged durability and the freedom to explore toyota has a long history with the outdoor community and they're committed to helping more people get out there and experience what nature has to offer.

17:46From remote trails to scenic byways, Toyota Trucks empowers you to take the detour, roam freely, and discover places that still feel wild and untouched. And they're not just making great trucks, they're working to expand access to adventure so more people can connect with the outdoors and pass that passion on to the next generation. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. That's toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided, if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist.

18:23That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like the Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you an ad-free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free. No interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for.

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