Don’t Rush Through This | Ask DS

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2:28Welcome 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.

3:12Don't rush through this. You look around and you see people rushing everywhere. rushing through traffic, rushing to get their kids down to bed, rushing through work to get to the weekend. No time to talk, no time to sit. There's too much to do. There's somewhere to go. The faster, the better. And this was true in the ancient world as it is today. In Rome, people were rushing to get their mail, rushing to win the next public office, rushing to the next round of the games in the Colosseum, rushing to their next big accomplishment. At least that's what they thought. Seneca makes the point, however, that what we're really rushing towards with all deliberate speed is death.

3:48That's what he means when he says that we get death wrong. Death is not some distant thing in the future, some looming end date to which the proper response is to try to squeeze in as much time as possible before it comes. Instead, he said, death is something happening to you right now. It's happening to you as you listen to this episode. I hope it's been worth it. It's happening to you as you struggle to put on your daughter's shoes so you can drop her off at school. And then it's still happening as you sit down to that coffee meeting you rushed through, even though you didn't want to have it in the first place.

4:17The time that passes, Seneca reminds us, is death. It belongs to death. You'll never get to live that which has been lived again. So why are you rushing? Why are you thinking about the future at the expense of the present? But no season reminds us of the possibility of rebirth, of a chance for life to start anew, then spring. After the long hibernation of winter, it's time to reset, to reassess, a patient time to plant seeds in the form of better habits and better routines so you can reap what you sowed come summer and fall with more meaningful relationships and success and presence. And by the way, that's what we created this challenge I've been telling you about, the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge.

4:59It's 10 brand new actionable challenges designed to push you to examine your choices, your relationships, your day-to-day patterns and move you closer towards living your best life. Remember how long you've been putting this off, Mark Surrealis writes, how many extensions the gods gave you and you didn't use them. He says that there is a limit to the time assigned to you. And if you don't use it to free yourself, it will be gone and never return. Don't rush through life. Don't rush towards death. Use the time assigned to you and sign up right now for the spring forward challenge that we're at Daily Stoic.

5:32You can sign up at dailystoic.com slash spring. It starts on March 19th. I'm really excited about it. I'm already feeling the weather change. I'm reminding of that Philip Larkin line. Begin afresh, afresh, afresh. And I hope you can do the same with me and thousands of Stoics all over the world. It's going to be awesome. If you did our New Year New You Challenge, it's a great way to build on that. If you didn't do the challenge and just sort of muddled through winter, well, I think now is the time to get serious. And I hope to see you there. Remember, If you're a Daily Stoic Life member, you get this challenge and all our challenges for free.

6:05But I hope to see you in there. DailyStoic.com slash spring. Talk soon.

6:18Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I brought you a chunk of my episode of my talk to the Kentucky men's basketball team recently. And here we are now in the middle of March Madness. And I wanted to bring you the little bit of Q &A that we had after this sort of an informal discussion, the football talk, which I'll bring to you later. You know, that was in a nice sort of theater. This was in the private dining room at Jand. And I just, you know, one of the cool experiences as I went around and toured the facility after is they, one of Coach Cal's assistants took me aside.

6:59He showed me this drawer and there was one of my books. They had a whole stack of Ego is the Enemy, which they give to recruits and players who join the team. That was just such a, not at all what I could have imagined when I wrote that book. And I think it says something about the power of stoicism. But anyways, I'll bring you this quick Q &A and I'll let you get back to watching basketball or whatever it is you're doing today. And I hope you enjoy.

7:40Look, I think we all face a lot of noise, right? And you guys face a ton of noise. You face the noise of the crowd. You face the noise of people on social media. You face the noise of people in the regular media. And then, yeah, you got teammates. You got competitors jawing at you. You got coaches telling you this. Maybe you got your parents telling you that. You got a lot coming at you. And so I think a stoic tries to cultivate a sense of some protections, right, between you and all that noise. You've got to decide what you let in and what you don't let in. And then you've got to go, okay, in this moment, if I, they just told me I'm not measuring up.

8:18And if I don't do X, Y, or Z, I'm going to get cut. Or, you know, someone just, we just had a real brutal film session and they showed me all the things I did wrong. if I add on top of that that I suck if you add on top of that what you're doing is taking away energy from what you can control, what you can do better and if you are responding emotionally instantaneously to how that thing makes you feel that's also a problem where I find ego or a lack of discipline can get me in trouble say I'm working on one of my books, I submit it to my publisher. I think it's the best work that I've ever done.

8:57I'm pumped about it. I want them to be like, you're amazing. This is the greatest thing we've ever read. But instead, you know what they do? They send me back. It's just filled with, this is wrong. This is wrong. There's a mistake. What about this? What about this? And the ego part of me wants to go like, who are you to tell me this? You don't understand me. All that sort of teenager-ness that we all still have in us, no matter how old we are. But what I do, I have practices. When I get those notes, I don't respond for a week. I let them sit. I let it filter in, right? And then I try to look at it from different angles.

9:30I try to get other opinions. And then what I try to find in that is, you know, what's valuable, what I agree with. I try to react from a place of understanding and confidence rather than a place of rebelliousness or ego. Then I try to do what I can to integrate that feedback into getting better. But if I send out a response three seconds later in that space of emotion, just like if one of you guys after a game is tweeting out the first thought that pops into your mind, the chances of that aging well or that still feeling true the next day, the day after, we're not making things worse for you, that's what you're trying to avoid.

10:17So it's about that space between you and the response. Even if that thing is unfair, even if it's frustrating, even if you are going to have to deal with it, it's probably not best to deal with it in the moment when you're hot. So the discipline to do that, to go like, hey, I'm going to deal with this tomorrow after I take a walk, after I think about it, that's a big part of what we're talking about. Yeah? So what are you supposed to say if you don't have an ego? I mean, it's confident and then it's ego. What are you supposed to be thinking if you're doing something? Am I not supposed to be like, well, I can bust his ass?

10:55Or am I supposed to be like, so how do you keep it not too low? Sure. Well, I can think about it, right? Like, let's take a different sport, like a price fighting or something, boxing, right? If you don't think you can beat the guy, you're not going to beat the guy, right? You got to have some sense that you train, you got a plan, you did the work, you know it's possible. If you go in there and you're doubting yourself, that's not going to work, right? But what is the cycle of prize fighting? So the underdog beats the overconfident champion, right? And then what happens? They become the overconfident champion.

11:31And so what we're trying to do is replace ego, which is either I'm unbeatable, I'm the best, I'm, you know, perfect. And then there's also the ego of like, I'm worthless, no one likes, there's also that self-obsession of the doubts, right? What they call impossible syndrome in the middle there, that's confidence. And I was thinking a lot about this. You guys know the story of David and Goliath, right? That's the story of confidence versus ego, right? Goliath thinks I'm unbeatable. Everyone else, like David's not the first challenger, right? A lot of people hear Goliath's challenge, but they don't think it's possible, right?

12:13They're afraid. But David has the belief in himself. He has the knowledge that he can do it. But he's also not like, oh, I'm God's instrument. Of course, I'm going to win. What does David do? David gets a sling. David has a tool. David has something that Goliath is not expecting. That's why he wins. So I think that's a good question. I'm not saying you're just like a carpet that everyone walks all over. You got to know your strengths. You also want to be aware of your weaknesses and you want to be focused not on how strong you are, but on what you're doing to be stronger or what you're doing to be better.

12:53That's what puts you in a position to keep learning and growing and not become complacent and thus vulnerable. One more thing. If you don't get emotional and you put the work in and you're not making shots, right so how are you supposed to be about that and you know you're coming in the gym every day putting in shots and you're missing shots sure so was getting mad about it making you hit the shots any better no right uh so so the the idea is is it's not that again it's no one is emotionless right uh it's not possible but when i think the stoics are trying that's why said it's about being less emotional, not emotionless, right?

13:37But what we're trying to cultivate is more of an even killing. I imagine when you were younger, missing shots hurt you more than it does now because you've taken so many more shots. You have a better sense of rhythms, you know, slumps are inevitable. You also cultivate like you know whether it was a good shot or not, whether it goes in, right? Regardless of whether it goes in, right? And so it's not that you don't feel it. You got to feel it. Like a person who doesn't care about the game, there's a sort of sin there like a monk that's probably not going to do great. But what you're understanding is that like, hey, I'm getting upset about this.

14:14I'm getting mad about it. Like worst case scenario, you know, you're getting a technical. You're giving points to the other team or you're making stupid mistakes because you're not in your head. Like there's a reason we talk trash, right? We talk trash because we want to provoke the emotions of the other person because we know when they're emotional, they're not as good as they can be. So we got to understand that that process is also happening to us, right? And the more of an even keel, the more equanimity or poise we can have, the better we're going to do in big moments.

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