Handle What You Control First | Robert Greene's 6 Stoic Concepts For A Fulfilling Life

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1:29Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On 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.

1:52Handle what you control first. Life is frustrating. You're waiting for people to get back to you. You're waiting for approval on stuff. You're waiting for things to ship. You're dealing with bureaucracy. You're depending on teammates. You're dealing with the fallout of decisions that weren't your call, rules that you don't agree with. It's interesting, though, how often we complain and chafe against these constraints. And yet, when the ball is actually in our court, we're slow. We're indecisive. We don't do our best. More than strange, it's wasteful madness. The Stoics say over and over again that there is stuff that's in our control and stuff outside of our control.

2:28But this delineation is about more than just putting stuff into categories or learning how to practice the so-called art of acquiescence. It's a statement of priorities. The things in your control, you have to get them under control. You're never going to be able to make others speed up. But you can use the time they take up to decide what you're going to do when it's time to respond. No amount of yelling is going to make that container ship in the Atlantic go faster. But you can handle everything else you need to handle before it comes in. You can't eliminate the red tape in the DMV, but you can trim the inefficiencies in your own office, and that will still save you time.

3:05Stop beating your head against the wall where it makes no difference. Focus on what you control. Handle that first. Actually, not even first because that implies it's possible to somehow get to the bottom of all of it. It's a lifelong task, getting your own house in order, improving your own processes and decisions, and ultimately dealing with what's up to you.

3:29I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods. We get all our groceries for the week. Then we have dinner. It's one of their favorite things to do. It's one of my favorite things to do. And then my wife loves it because she doesn't have to take care of it. This holiday season, whether you're a guest or hosting the big dinner Whole Foods Market, has what you need to delight everyone at your table. They even have heat and eat sides from the prepared foods department. you can make Whole Foods your one-stop shop. Everything follows Whole Foods Market's strict ingredients standards so you know it'll be delicious and good for you.

4:03You can also order online for pickup and even delivery in select zip codes to skip the crowds. Shop everything you need at Whole Foods Market, your holiday headquarters. You're going to have failure in life. People are going to hurt you. But that is life. That's what it is. So to resist that, to be angry about that, means to not love life.

4:28itself. To me, he's one of the great living philosophers of our time, certainly one of the best selling philosophers of our time. His books have sold millions of copies all over the world. His works have changed the lives of athletes and musicians and world leaders. And he directly changed my life, talking about the great Robert Greene, 48 Laws of Power, Art of Seduction, Mastery, Laws of Human Nature, The Daily Laws. I'm Ryan Holiday. Today, not only have I written a number of books about Stoic philosophy, I've spoken about it to the NBA and the NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders.

4:59And in today's episode, I want to give you not just some really genius things from the one and only Robert Greene, but I want to give you Robert Greene talking about Stoic philosophy and some Stoic lessons that he's applied, that you can apply, that connect Stoicism to his work on power and warfare and strategy and human psychology.

5:21The thing that you and I made together, which is the Amor Fati coin, which is the idea that it's also a Nietzsche phrase of sort of loving everything that happens to you, not resenting it, not fighting against it, not carrying around a grudge or a burden, but sort of embracing it and finding the good in it. Yeah. Where does that fit in with our human nature? Well, it doesn't fit in because it's not natural to us. Our natural frame, our natural starting position is when something bad happens, why me? To feel sort of a grievance, to feel that things aren't fair, to feel that other people aren't giving you what you want or what you deserve.

6:04We start from a position of feeling kind of sorry for ourselves. We deserve more than what we're getting. And so overcoming some of these natural elements in human nature and turning them around and using them for another purpose, another way. And amor fati is very powerful in that you train yourself to accept everything that happens. It's sort of a banality to say that things happen for a reason, but there's some truth to it. For Nietzsche, it was, this is life. Life involves pain. Life involves adversity. You're going to die one day, and it's not going to be pleasant. Your friends and family members, they're going to die one day, and it's not going to be pleasant.

6:46You're going to have failure in life. People are going to hurt you. But that is life. That's what it is. So to resist that, to be angry about that, means to not love life itself.

7:01Seneca has this thing, but I still struggle with what it means. He says, we suffer more in imagination than reality. Now, I think he's saying, and I was talking to a friend who's sort of dreading this thing that's going to happen. and he's worried about this negative news article that's going to come out. I was talking to him about it and I was saying, look, like it's going to happen and it's going to either be really negative or not that negative, but you're borrowing the suffering in advance. You're feeling crappy about it before it's happened. I'm just curious, what does that quote mean to you?

7:32I often have the idea as I'm meditating, there's a world out there that has nothing to do with me that's completely indifferent to Robert Greene. The birds could care less about my fate. the trees don't know anything about my existence. The sky doesn't care at all about me, right? Okay, that's the reality. That's the world. But my thinking creates this thing as if I'm the most important thing in the universe, that everything that happens is going to happen to me and it's going to be bad, etc. So to be able to see that thinking traps you so many times into patterns that you've been programmed to respond to situations, a lot of times by anxiety, thoughts pop up about, I've got to do this phone call or, oh, I forgot to email that person or damn it, this interview is coming up and I don't want to do it.

8:20So much of the thoughts are anxieties that you're anticipating what's going to happen, right? If you can just control that, if you could just see that that is the source of your problem and that the world is indifferent to you and that the circumstances are totally neutral and that newspaper article that comes out, you can't control it and maybe the bad stuff will actually in the end rebound to your favor or it'll make you tougher it'll make you realize certain things if you can just see them as facts then you've got the power my philosophy has always been you have to make ideas your own you have to take what somebody teaches and you have to put it into your own experience it can't just be these dead words that you kind of digest that have no relevance to your daily experience you have to take them they had to come to life within you, within your own experience.

9:11So you read a passage and, oh, that's not maybe what I'm really going through right now, but you kind of maybe recall some experiences in the past that might be relevant. And then the second day you come about something that is maybe a little bit closer. And then as you go through it more and more and more, that kind of soaks in and you see more and more access points to your daily experience. And then it can kind of become something that you internalize. Death is the ultimate barrier for all of us, not just physically but psychologically. I maintain that human beings are messed up, screwed up in so many ways because of their awareness of death and their fear of death.

9:56It is through this fear that we created all kinds of superstitions, that we created the idea of an afterlife. You're enslaved by this fear. You're not aware of it. It's controlling you. Overcoming it is the ultimate freedom. Most people are going to say, oh, that's not me, as they say for all of these chapters. Other people, they're irrational, not me. Yeah. Oh, I'm not really afraid of death. I play video games and I'm always killing people. I watch movies and people are always dying. I'm not afraid of that. Our culture was permeated with cartoon versions of death. Your death is something physical.

10:31It's going to happen to you. It's a very visceral thing. You are afraid of it. And that fear creates what I call latent anxiety. It makes you fearful of a lot of things in life and you're not aware of it. It makes you cautious about failure. It makes you cautious about taking risks. So I'm trying to show you that your fear of death has infected you on many, many levels. And so I compare it to this. I use the metaphor in the book. I don't use many metaphors, but this is one I use. is that death is like this vast ocean that we stand on the shore of. Most animals are not aware of their mortality.

11:12We are the only species, as far as we know, that's aware of its mortality. And here you are on the shore of this immense, vast ocean. You don't know what death is or what it's going to be. And you're afraid of it, and you turn your back to it. and we humans have the ability to explore things, to conquer our fear. And I want you, instead of turning your back, to actually enter that vast ocean and explore it. And I show you ways of exploring the actual thought of your own mortality and how it can free you and inspire you in many ways.

11:48You know who one of the great Stoics of the 20th century was? No. Alfred Hitchcock. Directing a film, if you've known other people who've done it, is an extremely stressful job. It's like directing an army into a campaign because problems are arising that you cannot anticipate. There's all this pressure. There's all this money. You've got insane egos of actors, producers, et cetera. It's a constant adrenaline rush going through. You can't control your emotions. So Hitchcock, people would look at him on the set and he'd be falling asleep in the director's chair. He'd look like Buddha. His eyes were closed.

12:24Why? Because he prepared for everything. He anticipated everything that was going to happen. And so by the time the film came, he was completely bored because he knew he was able to control every aspect of the production.

12:37What I want to train you, the reader, to look at is to not look at people's, what they say or their appearance, but to look at their actions and the patterns of their behavior. So for instance, I talk about Howard Hughes in Chapter 4 as somebody who's got a very weak character who was a horrific businessman. And people were lured in by his image of this sort of maverick aviator, kind of, you know, great Hollywood person, etc. But if you looked at the patterns of his behavior, you would have seen that he was actually quite toxic. So stop looking at what people say about themselves and look at their actions.

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