How To Survive A Travel Nightmare (The Stoic Way)

0:00Ryan Holiday: So I just got back from two weeks in New Zealand and Australia. I was on tour for Daily Stoic Live. And we stayed in two different places in Bondi Beach. I would wake up every morning, go for a long run. And it's been one of my favorite places like a decade and a half. Actually, it made me think while I was there that the very first time that my wife and I went to Australia, part of how we paid for that trip was we listed our house on Airbnb while we were gone. That was something we would do back then, especially as I was making that transition from marketing, my corporate career to writing, is that when I would travel for talks, we would list our house on Airbnb.

0:36Ryan Holiday: We had this little house in East Austin, and that's how we covered the mortgages. When we were gone, people would stay in it while we were out of town. If you have space and you're going to be away, maybe that can be a memorable place for someone else to stay. Your home might be worth more than you think. And you can find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host. Nothing tests your stoicism quite like travel and I have an absolutely insane travel schedule ahead of me. Taking the red eye to London. I'm in London for like 24 hours. I do a TV interview, talk, and I fly from London to LAX. Take a car from LAX to San Diego.

1:10Ryan Holiday: San Diego, I'm there for one day to give a talk. And I fly late that night, immediately after the talk, to Sacramento. I'll meet my wife and kids there and then we are driving to Lake Tahoe to see my sister and her baby. So it is going to be absolutely insane before we catch another late night flight to be back in time for school on Monday. Let's see if we put this stuff into practice.

1:35Ryan Holiday: Shocker, we were delayed flying into Heathrow. But actually, it's not a shocker. That's how it goes when you fly into Heathrow. The Stoics talk about not expecting figs in winter. They talk about being prepared for the likely scenarios that could happen. Seneca has this idea of premeditatio malorum. He actually uses travel as an example. He says, you're going by ship. Might there be pirates? Might there be weather delays? Might there be no wind? Right? Things can happen when you're on the road. So don't be surprised by them when they happen to you. The unexpected blow lands heaviest, the Stoic said.

2:09Ryan Holiday: Don't be surprised by it. In fact, prepare for it. The pilot did a really good job preparing us for this. As we started to approach Heathrow, he said, look, fall goes as planned. We'll be on the ground in about 30 minutes. But he says, this is Heathrow. So there's a good chance we might have to wait for a spot. He says, we're going to go into the stack, which is where they stack planes up waiting for slots to land. And that's actually what happened. We went into the Occam stack. It was about a 30 minute travel delay. Wasn't fun. It was a little annoying. It set my plans back a bit. But I've flown into Heathrow before.

2:38Ryan Holiday: I know not to expect figs in winter. I know not to expect being on time. And I know that this is actually the least bad of the scenarios. I've been way more delayed flying into Heathrow. So the keys to good travel, and what I'm reminding myself, especially on this trip, is to be prepared for the things that are likely to happen when you are traveling like this. Don't be surprised. Don't take it personally. Focus on what's in your control. One of the keys to traveling well is understanding the most basic premise of stoic philosophy, which is that there's some things that are up to us and some things that are not up to us.

3:10Ryan Holiday: The fact that traffic was backed up at the airport on the way in, not in my control. whether I stress out about it is in my control. The fact that the flight was delayed on the way in, not in my control. Again, how I use the time, that is in my control. How other people behave at the airport, not up to you. How you treat other people at the airport is up to you. You don't control the weather, but yelling at the person working at the counter doesn't change that. So this is the basic premise of stoicism. It goes all the way back 2 ,000 years ago to Epictetus. Some stuff is up to us. Some stuff is not up to us.

3:45Ryan Holiday: If you can get good at acceptance, if you can get good at some humility when you travel, you will be less miserable, I promise. I was in front of this hotel here in Shoreditch like 10 years ago. I was on book tour. My wife and I are about to get out of the car and boom, a car smashes into the back of the cab. You're just like, are you serious? Is this another thing happening? And it was another thing happening, which is the right attitude when you're traveling. To see it all as an adventure, to see it as all part of the trip, as all part of the experience. I try to remind myself of that when I'm traveling with my kids.

4:14Ryan Holiday: The trip doesn't start when we get there. That's not when the quality time starts. It's all quality time. So to rush through it, to be in a bad mood, to be anxious, to be out of the moment is to deprive yourself of an important part of the experience. It can all be fun. It can all be enjoyable. It can all be memorable if you choose to see it that way. This is what the stoics say when they say that our life is died by the quality of our thoughts. And the most important thought, the most important mantra you can have when you're traveling is, this is part of the experience. This is what I left the house for.

4:41Ryan Holiday: This is what I am doing. And so to shake your head at it or to be annoyed by it or to be inconvenienced by it is to miss the opportunity that is right there in front of you. And that's the crazy thing. Ultimately, what you remember is not the nice dinners you had or the beautiful views. All that's great. You remember the ridiculous things that happened. You remember the stories. You remember losing your passport. You remember getting food poisoning. You remember that crazy encounter. Those are the things that you remember. So see it that way and enjoy it in the moment. but give yourself the gift of enjoying it while it's happening, not just later.

5:15Ryan Holiday: Travel doesn't make you anxious. Flying doesn't make you anxious. It took me a long time to realize this. I thought about all the things that made me anxious, and you know what they all have in common? Me. I'm the common variable. This is what Mark Cerullus is talking about in his passage in Meditations, where he goes, today I escaped my anxiety. He says, no, no, that's not right. Today I discarded my anxiety. It was within me. We are the source of the anxiety. The airport is objective. flying is objective, driving is objective, it is an activity. And then we have worries, we have fears that we bring to.

5:47Ryan Holiday: I'm not saying it's as simple as this to not be anxious, but it is important that we don't make something else responsible for our feelings. It's not things that upset us, Epictetus says, it's our opinion about things. It's a story that we tell ourselves about flying, about being on time, about not missing the train, about what we need to pack, about what we need to bring, about what's going to happen when we're there. That's why we're anxious. We do have the ability to influence that story. We have the ability to change that story. It's not the thing that's making you anxious. It's you that is bringing the anxiety to the situation.

6:22Ryan Holiday: And the sooner you realize this, the better you will be at travel. So this was a very short trip to London, like less than 36 hours. But I do have one stoic travel hack, which is that I go for a long run in every city that I'm in. So I did eight miles yesterday. I did seven, three quarters today. So I didn't get to go to every museum that I wanted or visit every restaurant that I would have liked it. But I did get to see 16 miles of the city. I crossed off all the big sites, which is the first part of the travel hack. But the second part is actually the most important, which is that we do hard things, right?

6:53Ryan Holiday: Seneca says we treat the body rigorously so that it's not disobedient to the mind. When you push yourself physically, when you know that you're capable of pushing through the tired, pushing through the exhaustion, pushing through the resistance of not wanting to get up and do the thing. That's a helpful thing to draw on when you are traveling far distances, when it's taking longer than you thought. You do hard things because it makes you physically stronger, but it also makes you mentally stronger. You know you're capable of endurance because you proved it to yourself that morning. You know that you're capable of going further than most people because you did it that morning.

7:27Ryan Holiday: What you have to remember when you're traveling, Seneca tells us, is that he who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary. So yeah, things could go wrong. You could be delayed. There could be unexpected expenses. The weather could be terrible. Things could happen that could ruin the trip. But you know what? That hasn't happened yet. And there's no guarantee that it will happen. This idea that our anxiety, our worrying is a bad use of our creativity, it's making us suffer imagined troubles in advance. And that's insane. Yes, you want to be prepared for the things that could go wrong.

8:04Ryan Holiday: You want to be prepared for contingencies. You want to be able to be flexible. What you don't want to do is ruin it yourself because something might happen that could ruin it later. It was an hour and a half drive to Heathrow. I've got two hours before my flight. It's probably going to get delayed because all the flights out of Heathrow have been delayed. The question is for the Stoics, what do you do with the time? Travel is filled with time where you're just sitting around. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got in my life was from Robert Crean. He said, there's two types of time in life, dead time and alive time.

8:35Ryan Holiday: How are you using that time? I'm using that time to read. I am reading. It's so hard to find time to read as a parent, except for when I'm traveling, I make up for lost time then. So you're going to get stuck places. You're going to be waiting for things. You're going to be sitting around. The question is, how do you use that time? So we live on Halloween Street and we go crazy over Halloween decorations. And we're having to do it twice this year because someone stole a bunch of our Halloween decorations. I don't blame them. We have awesome Halloween decorations. We actually got a bunch of them from Wayfair.

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10:50Ryan Holiday: I made it to San Diego, but it wasn't easy. I did two talks in London, and then I had an 11-hour flight from Heathrow to LAX, a two-hour drive from LAX to San Diego, 24 hours with no sleep so I could adjust to the time zone, and then today I have another talk. It was hard. It took a toll on me. But see, this is one of the reasons why the Stoics trained physically, why they pushed themselves, because life was hard. Life was going to push you. You practice hard things so that when hard things happen to you, you know how to deal with them. Marcus really said that life is warfare and a journey far from home.

11:25Ryan Holiday: I think what he was saying is that it's difficult. It's exhausting. You got to have a certain amount of fortitude, a certain amount of strength. This is why I love endurance sports, because you're training not for the sport, what you probably won't have to do in real life. You're training for real life, which is harder than the sport. Like if you have that capacity to push yourself physically, to challenge yourself, if you know you can get past being tired, if you know you can get past being blearied, if you can do the thing that you have to do, even though you really don't want to, even though it would be easier not to, well, that's a really special skill.

11:57Ryan Holiday: That's the ultimate muscle to build. So if you want to be able to handle the things that are going to happen on the road, you push yourself physically because life is going to demand that capacity from you. I understand that I'm very spoiled. These are some of the most beautiful places in the world. I'm in San Diego. I'm going to be in Lake Tahoe tomorrow. I was just in London. But one of the things that the Stoics remind us is that beauty is everywhere. My favorite passages from meditations are when Marcus Reyes is seeing the world like a poet. It's easy to be awed by the beauty of the ocean or the Grand Canyon or a majestic cathedral, but can you see the beauty in the ordinary?

12:33Ryan Holiday: He talks about the stalks of grain bending low under their weight. He talks about the flecks of foam on a boar's mouth. He talks about an ordinary loaf of bread, how it cracks open in the oven. The Stoics tried to cultivate this poet's eye. They tried to see the beauty everywhere. The whole world, Seneca said, is a temple of the gods, not just the temples, not just the mountains, not just the beach. So yes, soak in the beauty when you're traveling. and travel to beautiful places, but understand that you can find this beauty everywhere. You just have to look for it. This is also what Mark Sreelis is talking about when he talks about how our life is dyed by the color of our thoughts.

13:11Ryan Holiday: So if you see where you are as ugly and drab, if you don't cultivate this poet's eye, you're going to need to travel more. But if you can understand that anywhere there is life on this planet is beautiful and stupendous and miraculous and almost absurd, then you can appreciate where you are. And that's one of my favorite things to to see where I live like a tourist, like a poet, to find the wonderful things, to find the beautiful things, and also to find the beauty and the wonder in the ordinary things. On this trip I've been in different climates, different countries, across different oceans.

13:43Ryan Holiday: Saw the Atlantic, that's the Pacific behind me. The one thing that all these places have in common, they're all very different, but the one thing they all have in common is me. And as they say, wherever you go, there you are. The Stoics say that if your fantasy of traveling is you're going to get away from your problem, You're a fool. Seneca says each man flees himself, but you bring yourself with you. So for the Stoics, seeing travel as an escape was a delusion. Marcus Rios talked about the fantasy of wanting to get away from it all. He says you want to go to the beach or the mountains or a resort.

14:13Ryan Holiday: But he said what you have to understand is that you could have that kind of retreat right now inside yourself. So you have to be able to go inside your own soul. You have to be able to ask yourself tough questions. So yeah, wherever you go, if you think you're escaping your problems, you're bringing yourself with you. But you also have within you the solution to those problems. So you don't have to travel to an exotic place to get better, to get relief, to get clarity. It's within you at any moment. And you can have it in the busyness of an airport. You can have it in the busyness of school pickup, the normalcy of your routine.

14:44Ryan Holiday: You can have it sitting at home. You can have it anywhere. What you need is within you, the Stoics would say. The wisdom you need is not going to be found out there. It's going to be found in here. It's going to be found in the books that you need to read in the thinking that you need to do. We just got some bad news. My wife is going to fly from Austin to Sacramento. We're going to meet in Sacramento tonight, see my grandmother tomorrow, and then drive to Lake Tahoe for the final part of the trip. That's not happening anymore because her flight was not one or two or three hours delayed, but four hours delayed.

15:13Ryan Holiday: And now it's four and a half hours delayed. It's taking off at 12.45 a.m. this morning, which is crazy. It's basically a red-eye flight, which you cannot do. unless you absolutely have to. So we're not going to, which it brought up one of my most important travel rules, which of course came from my wife. We solve the problem first. So when we get on the phone and we say, hey, this flight's delayed, this isn't gonna happen. What we don't do is talk about why it happened. We don't talk about whose fault it is that it happened. We don't bemoan that it happened. We just get to work solving the problem.

15:46Ryan Holiday: Mark Sturwell says, don't waste your time delving into what lies beneath. You don't need to know all the whys and the hows. You don't need to know what everything means. What you have to do is solve the problem. Ultimately, we've got to get them from where they are to where they need to be Let's solve that problem. We apply this rule all the time when we're traveling because somebody forgets something somebody does this wrong It doesn't matter whose fault it is. We can talk about that later right now We're gonna talk about how we're going to solve this problem that parts in our control the part that already happened The thing that somebody did why they did it what it means that can all be sorted out later.

16:19Ryan Holiday: Let's solve the problem first

16:25Ryan Holiday: And so it ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. I am officially back on the ground in Austin, Texas, barely alive, literally, figuratively. So we were supposed to fly from Reno to Austin. Yesterday, we had a 2.55 p.m. flight. We're supposed to fly through Denver and then get home to Austin in the late evening. and on the way to lunch before we had headed to the airport, we got an alert that our flight was delayed. So we're having a nice lunch. And then we found out that the flight had been changed. They bumped us from that flight to another one. It was going to be so late, we were going to miss the connection.

17:03Ryan Holiday: So then we had to rush to the airport and then found out that we were now flying from Reno to Vegas where we then had a four hour layover before we were supposed to fly back to Austin, getting in at 12 30 a.m which is pretty brutal if you have kids and they have school the next morning the first flight went on eventful we landed and we found out the gate next to us had an earlier flight to austin on the same airline so i went and got on all four of us on standby for that we had to wait you know in bated breath to see if we would make it and the gods favored us And they called me to the front desk and they said, OK, three of you can go home to Austin.

17:44Ryan Holiday: I said, what? I can't leave them or they leave me. How's this going to work? And then one other person didn't show up. And then a fan who recognized me came up and said, wait, no, that's supposed to be me. I'm supposed to be on this flight. I don't know what happened. And then he successfully argued to take that fourth seat. So then we were back to three seats, whatever. He seemed very nice. He told me what a huge fan he was. and then he left my family stranded at the airport for four hours. So appreciate that, bud. We stayed for four hours, flew home, landed at the airport, got back to our house at 1.30 in the morning.

18:20Ryan Holiday: That's pretty brutal when you have a 6.30 a.m. cross-country practice for your kid at school, but we made it. And then I limped through today and I am back on the ground. But am I complaining? No, I'm not. Because even though everything that could go wrong on the trip in some ways did go wrong, The big thing that could go wrong did not go wrong. I flew through the air thousands of miles. I crossed oceans. I drove over mountains. You know what? I'm still alive. The Stokes would say, memento mori, remember you are mortal. When you take a second and you think about your mortality, it's all the piddly things in perspective.

18:59Ryan Holiday: The worst case scenario is you don't come home from the trip. And we came home in one piece, despite everything that happened. and in that we are extremely lucky. And that's the final lesson. The Stoics want you to remember that any trip you walk away from was a successful trip. Any night, no matter how rough that you wake up from the next day was a pretty good night. I feel very fortunate. I feel very lucky. And so those are my Stoic traveling lessons that are easy to talk about, hard to apply when you are sleep deprived, when you are exhausted, when you are frustrated, when you are dealing with humanity at its worst.

19:36but there we go.

19:38Ryan Holiday: When I wrote The Daily Stoic I had this crazy idea that I would just keep it going. The book was 366 meditations but I'd write one more every single day and I'd give it away for free as an email. I thought maybe a few people would sign up. Couldn't have even comprehended a future in which three quarters of a million people would get this email every single day and would for almost a decade. If you want to get the email, if you want to be part of a community that is the largest group of stoics ever assembled in human history. I'd love for you to join us. You can sign up and get the email totally for free.

20:07Ryan Holiday: No spam. You can unsubscribe whenever you want at dailystoic.com slash email. We'll be right back.

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