Failure Doesn’t Define You—Neither Does Success | Always The Same

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0:56Failure doesn't define you, and neither does success. Of course he was disappointed. It had been a long and hard fall. He descended from West Point to second lieutenant during the Mexican-American War, but now Ulysses S. Grant was selling firewood by the side of the road. He must have hoped that no one would recognize him, and his heart would have sank when Simon Buckner, an old school and war buddy, did. Good God, Grant, he burst. What are you doing? But Grant decided he would not be ashamed. I am solving the problem of poverty, he replied. Grant knew what the Stoics knew, that outside circumstances don't say anything about us at all, that it didn't matter, as Epictetus said, what we bear, only how we bear it.

1:44Grant was feeding his family. He was doing honest work. What was so bad about that? After all, Cleanthes was a lowly water carrier in Athens, and proud of it. Now, had Grant been caught stealing to support his drinking habit, that would have been different. or if he'd accepted a Confederate commission because the pay was better. Again, that would be different. As I talked about in my episode with Ron Chernow on the Daily Stoke podcast, who wrote one of his best biographies about Grant, Grant understood this so-called menial work of selling firewood didn't say anything about him. What he cared about was making an honest living and providing for his family.

2:23The position didn't define him. And not only was this position temporary, but a few years later, he would become general of the Union Army, and a few years after that, president of the United States. And yet again, Grant would refuse to let those high positions define him either. As Marcus Aurelius commanded himself, we must accept it without arrogance and let it go with indifference. Like Grant, he saw that success and failure were meaningless. They were impostors. A rock thrown in the air gains nothing by going up, he said, and nothing by falling down. What matters is who we are. What matters is the character we live by.

3:08Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin, and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

3:53We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory.

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6:09Always the same. This is today's entry in the Daily Stoic. Think by way of example on the times of Vespasian, and you'll see all these things, marrying, raising children, falling, ill, dying, wars, holiday feasts, commerce, farming, flattering, pretending, suspecting, scheming, praying that others die, grumbling over one's lot, falling in love, amassing fortunes, lusting after office and power. Now that life of theirs is dead and gone. The times of Trajan, again, the same. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 4.32. And then the meditation. Ernest Hemingway opens his book, The Sun Also Rises with a Bible verse.

6:53One generation patheth, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever. The sun also rises, and the sun goeth down, and resteth to the place where he arose. It was this passage, his fascinating editor, Maxwell Perkins, who I urge you to read about. Perkins would say that it contained all the wisdom of the ancient world. And what wisdom is that? One of the most striking things about history is just how long human beings have been doing what they do. Though certain attitudes and practices have come and gone, what's left are people, living, dying, loving, fighting, crying, and laughing.

7:37Breathless media reports or popular books often perpetuate the belief that we've reached the apex of humanity or that this time things are really different. The irony is that people have believed that for centuries. Strong people have to resist this notion. They know that with few exceptions, things are the same as they've always been and always will be. You're just like the people who came before you, and you're but a brief stop over until the people, just like you, who will come after. The earth abides forever, but we will come and go. And I mean, I think meditations itself is a remarkable demonstration of this, probably not accidentally, right?

8:23All the things that Marcus is talking about, complaining about, worrying about, you know, seizing on are immensely familiar and accessible to all of us, right? 2 ,000 years ago, you know, sometime in the year, let's say 160 AD, Marcus struggles to get out of bed and writes a passage about how he likes to huddle under the blankets and stay warm. exactly the same, right? You think about the struggles Marcus Aurelius has with Commodus. Maybe that's what you're going through right now. You think of Seneca trying to contain Nero, telling himself, you know, I'm one of the good guys. I'm one of the adults in the room.

9:03And you think about how politically people in the Capitol, which is named after Capitoline Hill, senators, right? Same position as people like Seneca had, were telling themselves about the current president, right? The same thing over and over and over and over again. People are people, places are places. I did a meditation on this. We did this road trip and we stopped in Tombstone, Arizona, which is the site of the gunfight at O.K. Corral. And what's fascinating, you walk down the streets of Tombstone. This is a place that's burned to the ground, been rebuilt to look historic for the most part.

9:39Some of the buildings actually are pretty old. But the point is, these bars, what stickers do they have in the window? The sticker is new. That wasn't a technology in 1880 or whatever. But they've got these stickers in the window. What do the stickers say? You can't carry a handgun inside this establishment, right? Same sticker I have on the front of the painted porch. But in the 1880s, that's what the gunfight at the OK Corral was about. It was about whether people could openly carry guns in town. I'm not making a Second Amendment argument here. I'm saying that people were fighting and arguing about the exact same thing, just as the Earps had moved to Tombstone, Arizona.

10:19Why? To make their fortune, to make a name for themselves, to have a better life. The same reason that maybe you're moving to Arizona or Austin or Europe, right? It doesn't matter. People are people and they've always been doing the same things. And I think what's so beautiful and reassuring, but also humbling about Stoic philosophy is these reminders that not that much has changed, that the hardware issues remain the same, the software issues remain the same, despite all the updates and attempts to fix the bugs. so we can calm down a little bit, right? People are people, places are places. History is the same thing happening over and over and over again.

11:06Time, as Matthew McConaughey's character says in True Detective, quoting Nietzsche, time is a flat circle. It's beautiful, as I said, haunting, humbling, all these things at the same time. And it's something we can't lose track of, and it's something we have to think about constantly. and when I hold meditations that's what I think of I've actually I've got the leather edition right here in my hands since I got my first copy of meditation I've been going through that one like I have a very worn copy has lots of notes in it I went through and I've been rereading it it's on my nightstand as I've been going through and rereading it what strikes me most is that I'm still making notes in the same spots about the same things just as other people have been doing for thousands of years.

11:54Maybe you have Seneca on your nightstand just as Jefferson had Seneca on his nightstand when he died, just as, you know, Cato died holding a copy of Socrates, right? It's a timeless tradition we're a part of, both intentionally and unintentionally. And there's something beautiful and terrifying in that.

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