How Stoicism Makes Coaches Better

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2:29Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

3:12Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. This was back in may I was flying trying to get to knoxville tennessee I was supposed to land in nashville and drive a couple hours to knoxville Ended up being crazy weather We circled for like an hour ended up landing in memphis Then we're supposed to wait a bunch of time To then get on a flight and I was like, you know what? I don't trust it I don't think it's gonna happen. I called my speaking agent. I said just give me a rental car. I'm gonna drive I drove like six hours in the same storm and made it at like two in the morning to Knoxville.

3:52And then I got up early that day. I went for a run and then I went over and I talked to the entire Tennessee athletic department about the connection between stoicism and sports. There were tennis coaches there. The head football coach was there. The swimming coach was there. Admissions officers. There's a whole bunch of people in the athletics department. We're all there as part of a coach's retreat, which I wanted to bring to you in today's episode. So enjoy.

4:27Thank you very much. It's good to be here with all of you. I do want to talk about ancient philosophy, which I know when you think ancient philosophy, you picture a bunch of dead old white guys or maybe some of the nerdier professors on campus. And maybe you're thinking, what does that have to do with what I do, right? What is ancient philosophy? What is big, unpronounceable words? What does ancient Greek and Latin have to do with what I do? And it is true. Philosophy can feel impractical and abstract and theoretical. But actually, the philosophers in the ancient world would have very much understood what you do, right?

5:10The Stoics were wrestlers and boxers. They were runners. They were chariot racing. That was the ultimate sport of Roman life. There was, of course, the arena, which they would have understood quite well. So the Stoics knew what it was to compete and to win, to push oneself physically and mentally. And this idea of mastery, particularly self-mastery, is at the core of the philosophy that I want to talk about today. Marcus Aurelius wasn't just a thinker, he was a doer. He was the emperor of Rome, the most powerful man in the world. And he would jot down at nights in a little notebook, like I see some of you have, notes to himself about how to be better, about how to do better, about how to reach his potential, about how to lead people, and primarily how to lead himself first.

5:58So I wanted to give you three Stoic lessons today, and then we'll get into a quick conversation, hopefully. These are Stoic lessons that are both simple enough that they can be reduced down to a single phrase, and yet hard enough to actually apply that I had to tattoo them to my arms so I would not forget them. But we're going to start with this idea that the obstacle is the way. So if I can take you back about 2 ,000 years ago to the time of Marcus Aurelius, A plague breaks out in Rome. It's a devastating global pandemic. It originates in the far east of the Roman Empire. It comes to Rome and it quickly overwhelms them in all the ways that COVID overwhelmed us, but in a much more primitive time and a much more primitive culture.

6:43It's all on Marcus Aurelius. They actually name it after him. It's called the Antonine Plague. and it lasts not for one or two or three years, but for 15 years, millions of people die. And it's the primary crisis of his reign, but it's not the only crisis. In fact, if the Antonyne Plague was the only thing that Marcus had to deal with, he probably would have counted himself lucky. There's also a series of devastating floods. Then he spends nearly half of his reign at war. there's betrayals there's a coup attempt there's rumors there's just the difficulty of getting things done he has 12 children so his life was sort of one thing after another um and he uh as one ancient historian writes he doesn't have the good fortune that he deserves this is basically 20 years of peace and prosperity then he takes over and what can go wrong will and it goes wrong one thing after another.

7:42And Marcus sort of staggers under the weight of all of this, as I think any normal person would. And I was telling you about his meditations earlier. Well, he writes in his meditations, referring to one of these crises, we don't know when, but he says, it's unfortunate that this happened, which is basically like the understatement of the century. But it was unfortunate that it happened. But before he could feel too sorry for himself, he actually catches himself and he goes, no, it's fortunate that it happened to me. He says, basically, it's fortunate that it happened on my watch and not someone else's.

8:12He basically says, I'm glad that I was trained for precisely this. And then he gets to work dealing with it. And this is basically the primary exercise in Stoicism, this idea that we choose how we're going to see things. Our frame of looking at it determines what we're going to be able to do with it. So it's this question of, is what we're dealing with unfortunate or fortunate? this is the choice that we get to make, right? We get to decide whether something is fortunate or unfortunate. The event is, and then we have an opinion about it, right? And Marcus says in meditations, he says, yeah, look, this is getting in my way.

8:52The plan that I had, the thing that I was trying to do, what I hoped my reign would be, something can get in the way of that, right? That's what obstacles are. But he said, I have this ability to accommodate and adapt and choose to use what I'm dealing with for my own purposes. He says the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way, right? This is the idea that the obstacle is the way. Basically for the Stoics, it was that any and every situation, right? Every moment in life is an opportunity to practice virtue or excellence, right? So we're going to be in situations that we didn't choose, that we didn't like, that are not fair, right?

9:34Where we don't have a lot of options, but the one thing we do control is whether we step up and meet that situation, whether we act as our best self. For the Stoics, there were four virtues, courage, justice, discipline, and wisdom. And the idea was that any and every situation, even a prison sentence, even a terrible mistake, even a pandemic, all of everything was an opportunity to practice one or four of those virtues. So when we say the obstacle is the way, we don't mean, oh, this terrible thing can magically be amazing. What we mean is that this thing is, nevertheless, an opportunity to practice virtue.

10:15And the Stoics were fond of sports metaphors, just like we are today. Epictetus, one of the great Stoics, would say that this is what life is. He compares them to ballplayers, some version of an athlete. He says, a ballplayer doesn't categorize a throw as good or bad. They're too busy trying to catch it and throw it back. He compares Socrates to being the ultimate athlete or ballplayer because that's what Socrates was. Not only in the course of a discussion could he ping it back and forth, that he didn't get offended, he wasn't challenged, he would always just try to respond, but that Socrates responds to persecution, he responds to war, he responds to being doubted, He responds to all the difficulties of his life, not in thinking of whether they're good or bad, but in how he's going to respond, how he's going to deal with them, right?

11:04And so this is the essence then of stoicism. It's a very simple idea. We don't control what happens. We control how we respond to what happens, right? We don't control other people. We control how we respond to other people. So there's everything in the world, right? All the events that are happening, all the things that are going on in the course of a season, in the course of a game, in the course of a relationship, and then there's this tiny bit that's up to us. And the Stoics would say the primary task of life, Epictetus says, the chief task of philosophy is discerning what's in our control and what's not in our control.

11:38And the reason this is so important, not just intellectually, but also strategically, is I don't think it's controversial to say that the vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their energy on things that are not up to them. They have opinions about things that are not up to them. They spend all their time thinking about things that are not up to them. They throw time and energy after things that are not up to them. And that is a resource allocation issue. And when we focus on what's in our control, we're not only more efficient, but we're also more sane. So what do we control, right?

12:11Where are we wasting time and energy on things that make no difference, right? Caring what other people think about us, right? Caring about results, right? We control what we put in, not what we get out. And so the Stoics are trying to focus entirely on what we control. As you tell your athletes all the time, look, you don't control what's going on out there. You control how you play. You control how you train. And likewise, as coaches, you control how you coach, not whether every player understands this or appreciates it, right? You control how you recruit, not what the other coaches are doing, not how the rules are set up necessarily.

12:48You control how you lead, how you run your program, right? You control the standards that you set. Again, not if everyone appreciates them, not if everyone lives up to them, right? You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink, right? You don't control the weather. You control how you prepare for the different weather contingencies. You respond, You control how you deal with today's weather, right? You don't control what the refs do. You control whether you keep your composure in the face of, say, bad reffing, right? You don't control what they say about you in the media. You control whether you're living up to your own standards.

13:27You control whether you can sleep at night with what you're doing, right? You don't control whether they doubt you, whether they appreciate you're going. You don't control how they rank you. You don't control anything outside. you control what's in here, you control what you do, right? The Stoics would say we control our thoughts, we control our emotions, we control our decisions, we control how we choose to see things, and that's basically it, right? And so that might seem like a small amount, but the Stoics would say this is actually a vast empire, that there's more than enough to keep us entirely busy by just focusing on what we control.

14:05And so I want to go back to that quote about Marcus, right? The ancient historian is saying that Marcus doesn't meet with the good fortune that he deserved. It was bad timing. It was a bad stroke of events, right? It was one thing after another that wasn't his fault, right? But he says, I, for my part, admire Marcus all the more because amidst unusual and extraordinary circumstances, he both preserves himself and the empire. Is Marcus Aurelius because of what he went through, because of the moment he happened to be born, because of the events that happened that were not his fault? He was Marcus Aurelius because the composure that he had in spite of those events, the things he managed to do in spite of those events, the greatness that he embodied in that pressure cooker of a situation, that's what made Marcus Aurelius great.

14:56And so when we say the obstacle is the way, it's not just, oh, hey, the way that the deck is stacked against me, actually, I can flip this on its head and we can score a few extra points here. There is a sort of tactical understanding of the obstacle is the way there. But on the deeper, more profound human level, it's that the moment that we're in, the adversity that we face, the struggle that we face, the things that don't go our way, this is the opportunity to be great, to show who we are, what we're made of. And so we don't really care whether things are the way we want them to be or not, but we embrace and we love them.

15:30There's this stoic concept of amor fati, which means a love of fate. Mark Surrealis talks about how what you throw on top of a fire becomes fuel for the fire. He says it consumes it and turns it into flame and brightness and heat. But this isn't Totally true, right? A weak fire, if you throw even a ton of fuel on it, it will put that fire out. So the hotter the blaze, the hotter we operate at, the more force we have, the more we're able to convert even the hardiest of substances into fuel. So that's the idea of the obstacle is the way. What are we going to do about the situation we're in? What are we going to do about the moment we're facing?

16:12What are we going to make of it? This is our choice. How are we going to be great because of it? That's what the obstacle is the way is.

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17:59and that leads to the next idea which is this idea that ego is the enemy so my argument is that you don't actually get beaten by your competitors it's not the refs or the rules or the weather or the economy that we really need to be concerned about right that actually it's not an external threat an external opponent an external enemy at all it's actually inside this room the biggest competitor, the biggest opponent, the biggest foe is inside this room. And actually, it's inside all of us, right? It's ego. A great quote from Cyril Connolly says, ego sucks us down like the law of gravity. Look, you could argue that for an ordinary person who's not trying to do anything where the stakes are very low, ego is not their biggest concern.

18:45But it's actually the more accomplished you are, the more talented you are, the higher you're flying, that you have to worry about this gravity, right? Because the crash is going to hurt really bad. So this idea of ego is the enemy is that I've never been in a situation where I thought, you know what this team needs, you know what this meeting needs, you know what this crisis needs. Let's bring some bigger egos in here. That'll help us all get along. We'll all work better together, right? Confidence is important and we can make a big distinction between ego and confidence. Confidence being something based on the evidence, based on the work, based on what you control.

19:21And ego is something different. Ego is consumed with what other people think about us. Ego is concerned with getting our due. Ego is concerned, ironically, with all our insecurities. It tends to be a mask for insecurity more than anything else. I saw it. I was the director of marketing at American Apparel for a number of years. It was at one point the fastest growing fashion company in the world, had more than 12 ,000 employees in 20 countries, made something like 50 million garments a week, It was an enormous company, and it went to bankruptcy twice. The CEO shares that were at one point worth about$500 million went to zero.

19:56In fact, he went from being one of the richest people in fashion to having a net worth of negative$20 million, right? And this was totally self-inflicted. In fact, every step of the way, every crisis and crash that he went through, everyone around him was saying, don't do that. That's a really bad idea, right? Which is a curse of entrepreneurship, of leadership, of winning, right? Nobody thought you could do it. And they told you it wasn't going to work. And then you didn't listen to them. And it did work, right? You carved your own way. You clawed your way up from the top. You defied all expectations.

20:34You didn't listen to the doubters. And then this thing happens where we start to see all criticism, all concerns, all warnings as the haters, right? and we crash right off the cliff they were trying to prevent us from crashing off of. Kanye West, great example, just a person who utterly obliterates a multi-decade career, billions of dollars of value. This is Sam Bankman-Field, one of the richest people in the world as of the beginning of the year, now living back with his parents and almost certainly will go to jail. Elon Musk, I've never seen a person obliterate their reputation faster. The Stoics would say, right, focus on the things you control.

21:1899 % of his problems are due to tweeting about things that he just doesn't need to have an opinion about. Or he could just keep to himself, right? You can have the opinion, you don't have to say it. What is ego, right? Ego is, as they define it in Alcoholics Anonymous, I love this concept, a conscious separation from, right? A belief that you're different, a belief that you're apart, a belief that you're special, a belief that the rules don't apply. I just talked to a finance group yesterday. We were talking about this. The belief that it's different this time, right? Ego is making everything about you and how you're better than everything and everyone.

22:03Pat Riley calls this the disease of me. He talks about how a team on their way up is part of the innocent climb. This is where everyone comes together. This is where common purpose unites. This is where people are sacrificing for, sublimating for, and then the disease of me comes in and go, well, why did they get credit? Why did they get paid? Why are they getting more? And this is what tears the team apart. And it's why dynasties are so rare. It's why following up on a victory is so hard. The things that bound us together on the way up. The sublimation of ego goes away, and then everyone is fighting for what's theirs.

22:42Probably no one embodies this better than Kyrie Irving. Number one pick in the draft, goes to Cleveland, does pretty good. And then the greatest player maybe in the history of basketball wants to come back to your city and win a championship. You'd think he would be ecstatic. From the get-go, he sees this as a threat. They do win. They go to the finals three straight times, they win. And even after that finals win, Kyrie was thinking about being traded because he wanted to have the team all to himself. In fact, he reportedly never wanted LeBron James to come to Cleveland at all. Imagine how twisted ego has to get that you don't want to play with one of the greatest people of all time.

23:23One of the things that riles him so much about LeBron is that LeBron gets treated differently than the other athletes, which you can see why that could gnaw on someone. but instead of going hey i'm playing with lebron james kairi irving is thinking why does lebron's friend get to travel on the plane and uh so he ends up in boston so he's tears apart cleveland goes to boston tears apart a championship contender um has to apologize for saying the earth is flat um we shouldn't be too surprised about what comes later if that's the starting point that we're with. But imagine the ego of just thinking, literally, because I watched a YouTube video, I know more than every scientist who's ever lived, right?

24:07This is the problem that ego gets us. Then he goes to Brooklyn, tears Brooklyn apart, should have been an unstoppable dynasty there, a super team. The reason super teams don't work is because of ego. Both Shaq and Kobe reflect after their time together, how many championships they gave up by not being able to work together by seeing each other as threats. Then, of course, Kyrie forgets that we're in the middle of a pandemic. He forgets basketball is a team sport. So when you find yourself saying, I'm doing what's best for me, you're already screwing up. And then now he's in Dallas where he has already sunk now his fourth franchise.

24:49They would say character is fate. This is one of the Greek saying. So it's not just Kyrie. I don't mean to pick on him. Every coach along the way, every GM along the way, every owner along the way. It's different this time. I can fix him, right? My program, my culture is so strong, it'll be different with us. And of course, it's never different with anyone. A friend of mine is a coach in the NFL. He said, ego is the leading cause of unemployment in the NFL. I'd argue it's the leading cause of most unemployment, most bankruptcies, most catastrophic overreaches, most gaffes, right, most implosions.

25:29It's rooted not in what someone does to you, but what you do to yourself. This is also the story of empires, right? It's never the invasion of somebody else into your territory that sinks you. It's Putin invading someone else's territory because he thinks it's different, because he thinks he's invincible, because he can't listen to the people that tell him it's a bad idea. John Schneider, the GM in Seattle, someone asked him, how have you and Pete Carroll been able to work together for so long, right? One of the longest running front office coach relationships in the NFL. And he said, no ego. Ego is the enemy.

26:05What we think about is what we're trying to do together, not who's right, not who gets credit, not who's getting paid the most, right? But how do we do what we're trying to do together? One of my favorite Pete Carroll stories, he talks about this in his book, Win Forever. He's talking about how he would subject every year his players to so much scrutiny. He would break them down in the film room. He would show them everything they were doing wrong. But part of that can fill up a coach's ego, he was saying. And so at the end of the year, he would have his assistants put together a bit of game film, and then he would break down the coaches on the sideline.

26:46And he would force them to watch film of themselves, how they were coaching. And he was talking about how incredibly uncomfortable and unpleasant this was, right? When we talk about ego, ego is not about always trying to get the best out of everyone else, but focusing on what we control, right? How are we holding ourselves to a high standard? How are we always focused on how we can get better, right? This is what makes us better.

27:22Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized. You can get them sent to a friend. The obstacle is the way you go is the enemy. Stillness is the key. The leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoic. We have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.

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