How You Endure It Matters Most | Ask DS

0:00I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine which is I take them over to Whole Foods and we get all our groceries for the week then we have dinner it's one of their favorite favorite it's one of my favorite. 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. You 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. I got an amazing night's sleep last night.

0:45One, because my six-year-old fell asleep in the car at like six o 'clock and he transferred him from the car seat to the bed and it stuck, which is just magic. So he's in bed way earlier than normal. But I sleep really well every night because I have a 8 Sleep Pod 5 Ultra, which is 8 Sleep's best product. I've used 8 Sleep for many years now, and it's just totally transformed how I sleep, made me sleep better, made my wife sleep better. It's amazing. So basically, Eight Sleep is this topper that goes over your mattress. It can heat and cool both sides separately. It can raise and lower each side separately.

1:25So it helps you fall asleep faster, stay asleep, and then wake up better. Eight Sleep buzzes me to wake gently every morning, as opposed to some loud blaring alarm. And then I can check the app and it tells me my sleep score. It even helps me optimize my day based on how I slept. If you want to survive the holidays like a pro and just generally sleep better? Head over to 8sleep.com slash Daily Stoic and use code Daily Stoic to get$350 off your very own Pod 5 Ultra. The best part is you still get 30 days to try it at home and return it if you don't like it, but I know you will. Trust me, your body will thank you for this investment in better sleep, shipping to many countries worldwide.

2:09See details at eightsleep.com slash dailystoic. Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording.

2:46Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

2:56How you endure it matters most. No one knows what the future holds, but if it's anything like the present or the past, it will not be easy. Things will not go our way. Tragedies will happen. Injustices will be inflicted upon us. Institutions will crumble. People will behave awfully. Mistakes will be made. Disasters will strike. When and where and why, no one can say. But in a sense, the answers to those questions don't really matter. Dean Aikison, the Secretary of State under President Harry S. Truman, saw much of this in his own life, war and recessions and scandals and unfair personal attacks living through the Spanish flu.

3:36The last 30 years of his life were defined by the looming possibility of nuclear war. I am something of a stoic by nature and inheritance, he once said, explaining how he got through it all. I have learned from the example of my father that the manner in which one endures is more important than the thing that must be. endured. What the future brings the Stoic doesn't know, but how they must bear this future, the Stoic has total clarity with courage and self-discipline and justice and wisdom, with kindness, with grace, with dignity and determination. It's a simple prescription, but not an easy one.

4:11So you best start practicing now. This is the kind of leadership that I am trying to work on myself. It's one of the things we talk about in the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, which I think is one of the best things we've done. We actually got some advice from a two-star general in the Air Force. So you can listen to that as part of the challenge. One of the best interviews I think that we've done. Lots of great lessons in there. And there's a reason so many people have taken and loved the challenge. It's a six-plus week course on leadership, but it's really digestible. It won't overload you and it'll give you actual tangible stuff you can use.

4:47I can't wait for you to check it out. go to dailystoic.com slash leadership, or you can check out the leadership challenge at store.dailystoic.com, and I'll link to it in today's show notes.

5:09Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. This is going way, way back, not actually that long after I was first introduced to stoicism. I was writing for the UCR Highlander, which is the college newspaper at the University of California, Riverside. And there was a guy there. He wasn't a student anymore. His name was Joe Totten. He had been a student. He'd written for the newspaper and then he got a job. Basically, it was like sort of a cushy little transition job. People we knew would take after college where you got to manage the sort of business side of the paper having graduated.

5:43And Joe was someone I became friends with, I looked up to. I remember when I dropped out of college, a lot of the people I knew sort of thought it was a crazy idea. And Joe sort of really rooted for me and was just a super sweet, nice guy who I've stayed friends with for now, I can't believe, almost 20 years since. And And he asked if I would speak to his company, the company he was working at, I think he just recently left, called Gem, which is a sort of talent acquisition recruiting company. He worked there for a long time. Some of the executives had been fans and they had sort of dispatched Joe and said, hey, Joe, I think you know Ryan.

6:27Will you see if he'll do a virtual talk for us? So I did this virtual talk from a hotel room in Cancun, I think. I had to fly down there to do an in-person talk. And then I had just a few minutes before I had to run to the airport. It was a very tight schedule, but it was an honor to do this Q &A. It was a kickoff back in March for their employees. I talked about Obstacles Away, and then I answered a bunch of questions. And that's what you are going to listen to now. You can go to gem.com to see more about Gem as far as a recruiting and software company. But here is me talking to Gem about stoicism.

7:11And thanks to my friend Joe. He was supposed to come down here. We're going to spend a couple of days together. and then his kids got sick. So that's to be rescheduled soon. And I haven't seen him in a little while, but I'm looking forward to seeing him. In the meantime, you can hear Joe and I talking in this Q &A about stoicism and life. Enjoy. Thanks so much for being here. I'm a big fan boy. I follow you on Instagram and watch these daily snippets quite often. But I just, I wrote a question in chat But as a high achieving person, like yourself in a world where access creates so many things that you could respond to.

7:53Do you have any advice or recommended reading on how to prioritize that, which matters most? Yeah. One of my favorite quotes from Marcus, he says, in everything we do and say, we should ask ourselves, is this essential? Right. He says, because most of what we do and say isn't essential. And he says, when you eliminate the inessential things, you get the double benefit of doing the essential things better. Right. I think that's a great encapsulation of Stoke philosophy, but also just a life philosophy. And there actually is a great book. It's not based on this quote at all, though. It could be called Essentialism, which I really like.

8:29But the idea of like, well, what are the things that only you can do? There's another book I like actually by Gary Keller, the founder of Keller Williams, a real estate agency called The One Thing. You know, sort of like, what is your one thing? What's the thing that you do, like your main competitive advantage, right? There's a fundamental law of economics that I did learn in the one economics class I took at UC Riverside, which is the law of comparative advantage, right? If I pick apples better than you and you pick oranges better than me, we should specialize in what we do and trade with each other, right?

9:06But I think we have a problem trying to do everything. We have trouble delegating. We have trouble building up teams around us. And then we end up doing a bunch of inessential things that we're not great at that has the double cost then of making us less good at the things that we actually are really good at. Thank you. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Hey, Ryan, how's it going? I'm going to jump in if anybody has any other questions. Go for it. Awesome. Well, I have this like thing about mindset, right? And everything time I read your book, it's all about like my personal mindset, but I can't help that there's always parts of your life, seasons of your life where your mind starts to creep into this space of maybe I can't do this, or this is too hard.

9:53I'm not capable, but I'm wondering what specific self-practices that you have. And maybe an anecdote of when you've caught yourself in those moments and what you do to make sure that your mind doesn't creep too far into that zone because as you know it can spiral at any given time yeah i mean first i think just appreciating that not only do you do that but everyone does that even people who are really great at what they do do that and um understanding that it can spiral and that your job isn't to not have that feeling your job is to try to arrest that spiral before it gets too serious, right? When the Stoics, like, I don't think the Stoics are, you know, in English, right?

10:34The word Stoic tends to mean to people like has no emotions. I don't think the Stoics had no emotions. I think they just tried not to make decisions out of those emotions. So I like, we can make a distinction between getting angry and then doing something out of anger, right? Or having doubts, which is natural, and then quitting because you doubt yourself. Right. And so understanding that we sort of have the emotion, that it makes that it's reasonable that we have the emotion, but the emotion itself might not be reasonable. And we want to sort of take a second and put it up to the test, ask ourselves, like, is this actually true?

11:12What would it mean if I took decisions based on this? You know, what would it mean? What would the world look like if everyone did this? Right. And just sort of taking that sort of feeling and or that habit or whatever it is, and just kind of sitting with it and putting that up to the test. To me, that's kind of the essence of how you apply the philosophy. And I'm a big believer in routine. And so one of the ways that I sort of prevent those things from getting out of control is like, I have my practices. Like, this is the time I wake up. This is when I try to exercise. You know, this is when I try to do my work.

11:49And so having this thing that I come back to also prevents me from, you know, I think COVID was obviously really disruptive to people's routines in a lot of ways because suddenly they weren't commuting at a certain time, going to a certain place. But I think those of us who adjusted well figured out like, oh, when the world isn't dictating what we do, we have to make those decisions and build those practices in our lives or else we're going to become totally unmoored and spin off the planet. And so I do think like having the structure that I have in my life prevents me from getting too carried away with some of that stuff.

12:24Awesome. Thanks for sharing. So it sounds like the takeaway for me there is create the structure, stick to the structure. And as long as like when I'm finding myself creeping into those areas, kind of come back to my center place, which is the structure that I built. Yes. Love it. Thank you. Hey, Ryan. Hey, hi. Thanks so much for spending time with us today. I think all of what you shared is so relevant to what we're going through, but also just what so many tech companies are going through right now with the macro environment. You just briefly mentioned routines and structure. Could you expand on that and maybe share some more examples and go deeper into your routines and your structure and which of those things have been most impactful to you?

13:11Sure. Yeah, I have a couple of them. So I have young kids, so I get up early by choice, but also not by choice. They decide. But one of the first things I do when I wake up, I have a couple of rules. So number one is I don't check my phone for the first 30 minutes to one hour that I'm awake. Right. I don't want to get sucked into the phone. First thing, I definitely don't want to get sucked in to like social media or email. Right. Like I want to take a minute. And then so what we do is we, you know, sort of weather permitting. It was easier when they were small enough and I could just strap them into something and they didn't have a choice.

13:47But we go for a walk and we start the day by going for a walk. So we get outside, we watch the sun come up, we look at the animals, we talk, we think about what we want to do for the day. So that's how I start the day. I try to start the day with something really intentional, really healthy, really not work related, like really not screen related. And then I try to do a little journaling. And then my other rule is I do like whatever the hard task for the day is first, right? Like I try to, it's usually writing. So like, you know, if you put it off till the afternoon, you're bringing your worst self to that thing, right?

14:29I try to do it in the morning when I'm fresh, when I'm not frustrated, you know, and so I try to tackle that hard thing first. And then, you know, it could be like 11, 1130. And I've like I've already had a pretty good day. Awesome. Very cool. Thank you. Of course. Of course. Hey, I'm going to jump in. It's good to see you, man. Thanks so much for being here. hey man yeah i want to hear what this thing the lesson was talking about well we had we had we had conspired a little bit i might try to ask you some like inside thing or put you on the spot or something but um i'm going to take a different direction so we got to catch up last last spring i got to see you and sam and the boys and it was my first time like seeing you in person as a as a parent and you know you mentioned some of the stuff that that goes with that and and by the way it was so like cool to just see you as like this great dad, like so engaged with the boys.

15:24But, you know, one of the things on this idea of, you know, let's focus on what we can control. Let's choose how we're going to react to things. Like the best example that I can think of for that is trying to explain that to a three-year-old or a six-year-old, like, hey, you're going to have a better time here if you just think about how you want to react to this or how you could react to this versus just react. So we got a lot of parents at Jam and I'm curious what your journey has been on that front. Yeah, actually, I have a parenting book coming out in May. So I wrote The Daily Stoic in 2016.

15:54And then in May, I'm doing The Daily Dad, which is for all parents, it's just I'm a dad. So that's why it's called The Daily Dad, which is sort of one piece of kind of timeless parenting advice every day. But yeah, like my kids do not care at all about any of the Stoics or they sort of roll their eyes when they hear their names, even though I did these two kids books about the Stokes also. But I just try to sort of teach the ideas in that really simple idea. It's like, look, like your brother hit you. That sucks. You deciding to hit him back, that causes consequences for you. Right. And it's funny to watch a kid struggle with it.

16:34And then you can't get too upset because you realize like you have the same problem. Right. Like we all like stuff happens and then we have the reaction. We get upset. We get frustrated. We struggle. You know. We're still dealing with the same things that a toddler is dealing with just at higher stakes. And our brain is not that much more advanced, which is both, I think, humbling to come to terms with. And then also it sort of simplifies things. But, yeah, I think, you know, having having kids has been we're talking about routines earlier or routine. earlier, I think one of the, one of the things I've had to adjust to is like, um, creating some resiliency in my personal life in the sense that like, if you're somebody like, this is the way that I like to do things.

17:21These are the times that I like to do things. You know, kids really humble you in their ability to say, that's not how it's going to go today. Right. And, and realizing that actually maybe like routines, plural is a better way to think about it. Or like rituals or practices is a better way to think about it. Instead of going like, hey, this is how my day is from beginning to end. It's more like, these are the things that I like to do in the course of a successful day and being willing to shuffle them around and adjust. There's a great quote I heard. It's in Daily Dad. Somebody had a kid and he got a note from a friend and he said, welcome to the world of uncontrollable reality, right?

18:04And his point was that, you're supposed to get somewhere at two and you're driving and then your two-year-old falls asleep at 155 as you're pulling into the parking lot. Well, you're not going to get there at two anymore. You're going to get there when they decide that they're waking up because you know you're not going to screw the nap up. Just the idea that if we're supposed to accept a lot of things and come to terms with a lot of things and adjust around things is probably a good a macro lesson to learn to apply to the professional world for sure. Right on. Well, thanks again for being here, Ryan.

18:40And I'll just echo Leslie's sentiment. Like you're dropping into today and, you know, thank you for spending the time with us. I think I know your work and I know you, I needed to hear what you had to say today. I think a lot of us here did too. Yeah. So Ryan, I'm actually, so sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but that's actually why I find the daily stoic so helpful, which I will say I didn't have this morning. And I think I've got, you know, three or four takeaways from this conversation. One that I need to get back into my running routine in the morning. I need to do it first thing, because I'll be much better for everybody else after that.

19:17And that, you know, the, the just why we do what we do. It's all in the kind of how we see where we are, what are the actions we take in the moment? And And then, you know, just to remember who we're doing it for, the purpose of why we're doing it. And for me, you've really brought that kind of back into focus. And I so much appreciate it. I hope everybody else enjoyed. We unfortunately can't go on. So this is going to be the end of our time with you. But I think you've got a lot of fans. Everybody's very interested in your parenting books. I know I am because I actually, or your children's books too.

19:52I actually want to read your children's books because I think they probably distill it way down. and we could all benefit from that. So such appreciation for your time and I'm super excited we had the chance to have you join us this morning. My pleasure. Thank you guys so much. Take care of Joe for me.

20:20My family owns a 2023 Toyota 4Runner and honestly, it's my favorite vehicle that I've ever owned. Around town, it's smooth and reliable, but where it really shines is on our trips into the backcountry. We've taken it on backpacking adventures to Colorado and New Mexico, loaded it up with gear, and never had to think twice about whether it could handle the terrain. That's what Toyota Trucks are built for. Off-road confidence, rugged durability, and the freedom to explore. Toyota has a long history with the outdoor community, and they're committed to helping more people get out there and experience what nature has to offer.

20:49From remote trails to scenic byways, Toyota Trucks empowers you to take the detour, roam freely, and discover places that still feel wild and untouched. And they're not just making great trucks. They're working to expand access to adventure so more people can connect with the outdoors and pass that passion on to the next generation. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. That's toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided, if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist.

21:26That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like the Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you an ad-free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free. No interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for.

22:10and you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into Stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20 % off your first year. Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away.