Have You Read These? | The Brutal Truth About Ego (The Stoics Warn About)

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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. 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.

1:44Have you read these? You can't be a student of the Stoics without reading the Stoics. Beyond the quotes, beyond even the obvious well-known Stoic texts, you have to really read the Stoics. The Penguin translation of Letters of a Stoic is great, but you're missing out if you stop there because Seneca actually wrote hundreds more letters that aren't included. And what of Seneca's essays and his consolations? Have you read those? There's so many different great collections of Seneca. There's on the shortness of life. There's how to die. There's how to keep your cool. And that's not even getting into the fact that Seneca was the most famous playwright of his day and that many of these survived to us as well.

2:21Epictetus himself is more than just the Enchiridion. The Inchiridion is a handbook, a kind of greatest hits collected by his student Arian. A fuller sense of this slave-turned-philosopher is available in what we call discourses. You actually get both in a really good Penguin edition. But did you know that some of the speeches of Musonius Rufus, the teacher of Epictetus, also survive? And they're collected in a wonderful book called That One Should Disdain Hardships, translated by Cora Lutz. And what of Marcus Aurelius? You know, we've talked before about the importance of reading multiple translations, and Gregory Hayes is my favorite.

2:58That's where we have the leather edition. But there's also great editions like Robin Waterfield's Annotated Meditations that can give you a fuller understanding. And there's a collection of letters that Marcus Aurelius wrote to his beloved teacher Fronto, which you can still read almost 2 ,000 years after they're written. Seneca himself said that we had to linger over the works of the master thinkers. Marcus said that he learned from one of his teachers to never be satisfied just getting the gist of things. He meant that we had to read deeply, not just stay at the surface or with the popular texts.

3:31And this is great advice, not just for the study of Stoicism, but for all things. It's a torch that General James Mattis, a fellow Stoic and author of a great book called Call Sign Chaos, picked up when he said that someone who hasn't read deeply and extensively on a subject can be said to be functionally illiterate. So don't be that. Be well-versed, be well-studied, and read all of these books. I carry all of them in The Painted Porch, by the way. I'll link to them in today's episode, or just stop by sometime when you're in Texas.

4:12if you think you're perfect if you think you're invincible you think you can do anything you become stuck it gets between you and what you're trying to do what's most likely going to sink or destroy you is within you it is you and it's that ego i was the director of marketing at this company called American Apparel, which was at that point one of the fastest, biggest fashion companies in the world. Had 12 ,000 employees, had stores in 20 countries, including some lovely stores here in Australia. They made tens of millions of garments a year. They had sales of nearly a billion dollars. And I was working on that book as that company imploded, tore itself to pieces.

4:55And as it happens, Dove, the founder of American Apparel, fell prey to exactly that thing that I was just talking about. See, what happens when you do something that's hard or difficult is that along the way you meet people who tell you that it's not going to work, that it's too hard, that it's too risky, that that's not how things go. And by definition, you prove them wrong on the way to your success. If everyone listened to the critics and the realists, we would never experience change. Nothing new would ever happen. And so to succeed is, by definition, to defy the odds and to defy the doubters.

5:33But what happens to a lot of entrepreneurs and creatives and successful people is that they learn a very dangerous lesson from this, which is that you don't listen to critics, which is that doubters are haters, which is that people that try to guide you in a certain direction or help you or advise you are just holding you back. Sometimes they're trying to prevent you from plunging off a cliff. This happened at American Apparel. You can imagine, I'll give you another example, Elon Musk. When Elon Musk set out to take his internet fortune and put it into a space company, when he wanted to found SpaceX, his friends held a literal Alcoholics Anonymous style intervention.

6:14They said, you cannot do this. This is a terrible idea. You will lose all your money. Obviously, he didn't listen and created a multi-billion dollar company out of that. So when he decided to spend$40 billion to buy Twitter, which everyone said is a really bad idea and won't work and will blow up in your face and everyone's faces, why would he listen? He's been hearing that his whole life. And so what ego does is it makes it really hard to discern good advice from bad advice, truth from fiction. It gets between you and what you're trying to do. Actually, that's how they define ego in AA. They say it's a conscious separation from.

6:55Ego is a conscious separation from reality, from other people, from objective truth, from how things happened. It's something that inflates, that puffs up, that misleads. It's that voice that whispers in your head that they don't know what they're talking about. You're a genius. you were right last time it's gonna be like this always it's different this time that voice that gets in your head and this is why as Cyril Connolly said ego sucks us down like the law of gravity because sometimes they are right and we are wrong and ego makes it really hard to discern the difference and I saw that at American Apparel when they tried to tell Dove hey you you got to hire competent operators to help you run this now enormous company.

7:43Well, he saw all those competent operators as a threat. That's probably why a 21-year-old was running marketing at that company. In retrospect, that was also insane. When they said, hey, you can't have relationships with your employees. That's illegal. He said, who are you to tell me what to do? And then got himself in a lot of trouble. When ego tells us that the rules don't apply, that we're better, that we always know what we're doing, and all these people are holding us back. And I watched that happen, and it was a very terrifying and eye-opening thing. Actually, part of the reason I didn't quit the job is the Stoics said we shouldn't be pen and ink philosophers, just people who write and think all the time.

8:23We have to be out in the world meeting people, doing things, experiencing things, so we can match the theory and the ideas with the nitty-gritty of actual life. And so it was a very lucky opportunity. I mean, it was terrible to watch and sad and heartbreaking, but also very revealing, and it informed that book a great deal. I remember as I was working on it, I went and I visited an NFL coach who'd read Obstacle, and he said, what are you working on? And I said, you know, I'm thinking about doing a book about humility. It was still sort of in development. And he said, oh, that's interesting. He said, you know, ego is the cancer of my profession.

9:01And that really hit me. Ego is the cancer of my profession. I think it's the cancer of your profession. It's the cancer of all professions. It's a plague on this earth. I would say that the biggest obstacle that you face is not out there. It's not the economy. It's not regulations. It's not competitors. What's most likely going to sink or destroy you is within you. It is you, and it's that ego. And so how do we keep it at bay? What do we do about it? The two questions that I've gotten the most since writing Ego is the Enemy. The first is people go, of course, ego is really bad. I know this. My boss has a huge ego.

9:42What can I do about it? Never do they say, I have a huge ego. I need help with it. That's the definition of ego, by the way. We can see it in other people, but we think we don't have one because we're special and better. Of course, we all have an ego, but it's just easier to see the flaws in other people and to point them out and focus on them than to look in the mirror and handle our own stuff. The second thing I get is people go, obviously ego's bad, but don't you need a little bit of it? You need a little bit of ego, right? And this is maybe something I didn't do well enough in the book in retrospect.

10:18And if I was doing another version, I would talk more about it. There is, of course, a huge distinction between ego and confidence. I would actually argue on a spectrum, You have ego over here that sort of know it when you see it, ego that we all don't like, and we see how it holds other people back. And then on the other end of the spectrum, I'd actually say that like imposter syndrome or crippling self-doubt, people who believe the world is rigged against them, that it's impossible for them to succeed. That's another version of ego because, again, you're thinking too much about yourself. And it's somewhere in the middle is confidence.

10:53That confidence is the Aristotelian, the golden mean between these two extremes. And I actually think one of the oldest fables we have or the oldest stories we have is an illustration of this idea. The story of David and Goliath is not a story of big versus small. It's a story of confidence versus ego. Goliath issues his famous challenge in the war against the Israelites. He's big. He's strong. Let's settle this man-to-man combat. Whoever can beat me is the victor. And this challenge is ignored for 90 consecutive days. This is cowardice, fear. You can't have that. Then no one steps up. And then what happens is David, who's a shepherd, is visiting his brothers in the army, and he hears this challenge.

11:36And he says, why not me? Maybe I'll try. And they laugh at him. Again, he's brave enough to think he can do it, and they're convinced why he can't do it. And he says, no, no, look, I know I'm just a shepherd. I'm not a soldier, but it's not easy being a shepherd. You know, I have to be out there by myself. I have to take care of these animals. I have to fight off bears and wolves. Fight the elements. It's not easy. I think I can do it. And so as a joke, they fit him out in a soldier's kit. And he puts it on, and he realizes immediately that this isn't going to work. He's too small. He can't even bear the weight of the armor.

12:16And so he takes it off, and he has to get creative. He realizes he has his sling. He goes down to the stream. He fetches out a few stones, and then he steps up to challenge Goliath. And Goliath laughs at him, which is the last thing that Goliath ever does. Because soon enough, he's felled by one of these stones, which rockets off the slingshot at an incredible speed. And then this is the part of the story they don't tell kids. David cuts off Goliath's head with Goliath's sword. And in the famous Carvaccio painting where David is holding Goliath's head up like this, the head almost being bigger than his whole body.

12:52The sword that he's holding has the Latin acronym HOCS on it, which just stands for humility kills pride. What David has is confidence, but also some self-awareness. He thinks he can do it. He knows he can't do it certain ways. He certainly knows he's not as strong as Goliath. What Goliath has is ego, a sense that he is invincible and unbeatable and thus totally unaware of his weaknesses and vulnerabilities. The reason ego is so dangerous is not only that, but it is easily outmatched by someone who has some humility and self-awareness. What David is able to do is pit his strength against Goliath's weakness.

13:41And you have to have this self-awareness to be able to do that. If you think you're perfect, if you think you're invincible, if you think you can do anything, you become stuck. One of my favorite quotes from Epictetus, he says, remember it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know. We can see how in a less violent domain, what ego does, when ego thinks that you're God's gift, when ego thinks that you're perfect, when ego thinks you know everything, in a sense, you're right because you can't improve, you can't get better, you can't grow. Socrates, on the other hand, has this humility.

14:17He knows what he doesn't know. He's willing to ask questions. And in this, he is always getting better and growing. And so ego impedes us. It prevents us from changing and learning and adapting. And the confidence to know what we don't know, what we need to do better, where we have weaknesses, this is what we're trying to cultivate here. and ego is this thing that it creeps in it finds a way and so it's not this thing that you get rid of once but a thing that you have to constantly be on guard against

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