In Spite Of Everything, We Must Do This | How Stoics Find And Build Deep Relationships

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, which is a little bit of a little bit.

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2:42In spite of everything, we must do this. Marcus Aurelius must have wondered what he did to deserve all this. First, he lost his father at age three. Then he was pulled from his first love, philosophy, and pushed into politics. When he finally became emperor, roughly decades of peace exploded into 19 years of border wars and civil strife. There was a plague, there were floods, He had crippling health problems. At some point, as he buried another one of his children, as he wept over the ceaseless toll from the disease and pestilence, he must have thought, haven't I given enough? When will this end?

3:21What fresh horrors await? And yet somehow, some way, he never managed to give himself over to this despair. He kept going. He pushed away resentment and bitterness, fear, or helplessness. There are dark moments in his meditations, to be sure, but mostly what you see in those pages are little sentences about how life still has meaning, about how he can find goodness in the world, how he has to keep doing his duty. A full 10 % of the book is given over to things he's grateful for. So don't let anyone tell you that stoicism is a dour and pessimistic philosophy. Don't let anyone tell you that this is a philosophy of resignation.

4:01On the contrary, it is a deeply optimistic and resilient belief system. It's about not giving up, not giving in, not letting fate or misfortune break you, of loving life despite it all. Marcus never quit. He never took any of it personally. He never stopped being good. And neither can you. The Stoics didn't think that philosophy meant withdrawing from the world or from other people. On the contrary, they thought that life was about relationships, was about other people. So much of what Marcus Aurelius talks about in meditations is frustrations with other people, but also his love and affection and his connections with other people.

4:43And to me, that's the essence of what Stoic philosophy is about. Navigating the good and the bad of relationships with our fellow human beings. I'm Ryan Holiday. I'm the author of these books about Stoic philosophy. I've spoken about it to the NBA, the NFL, sitting senators, special forces leaders. I'm also just a regular person in the world with friends, with colleagues, with co-workers, with bosses. I've got parents, I've got children, I've got a wife. Like my life is enriched by and defined by my relationship with other people. And I use Stoicism to improve and enrich those relationships. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode.

5:25Marcus Aurelius reminds us to meditate often on the interconnectedness of everything in the world. He talks about at night when you see the stars, he says, imagine yourself running alongside them. Imagine yourself up there. Whenever I watch a sunset, whenever I people watch, whenever I look at some beautiful piece of scenery, I try to think about humanity as one giant hole. I try to think about all the generations that have ever lived, all the ones that will ever come. And I try to remind myself that we're all connected. We're all part of this. We're all one enormous organism. As the Stoics try to remind us, what's bad for that organism is bad for us.

6:00We're all connected. We're all part of this. We all share this. And I try to never forget that.

6:09Marcus Aurelius opens meditations by reminding himself that the people he's going to meet today are jealous and stupid and dishonest and cruel and mean and all these things, right? And he does this because it's true. At the essence of Stoicism is this idea of if you are surprised by the people you meet and the things that happen today, it's your fault. You didn't do your job. You didn't prepare enough. You didn't meditate enough. You were naive. So for the Stoics, it's about thinking about what you're gonna experience, about being really realistic, having your eyes all the way open. And then with your eyes wide open, doing your best because you're not caught off guard, because you're not surprised.

6:43You're not disappointed. In fact, you're pleasantly surprised that people turned out to be a little bit better than you thought.

6:52There is nothing quite as inspiring as seeing the values you admire embodied in the people around you. That's what Marcus really says. This is why heroes are so important. This is why monuments and statues are so important. But it's also why your friend group is so important. Who do you have in your life? You become like your friends. You are inspired by your family, right? if they are people you should have around you. So who you choose to have in your life, what relationships you choose to cultivate and maintain, that is everything. And it will, as Goethe says, determine who you become.

7:28The Stoics believed in this idea of sympathia, that there was this whole, this collective we're in. Mark Surius talks about the common good, not like once or twice, but dozens and dozens of times. He believed that, yeah, he was a Roman, and yes, he was the head of the Roman Empire, but all human beings were connected, that all human beings shared an affinity and a relationship and an obligation to each other. In book 654, he says, what injures the hive injures the bee. What's bad for the hive is bad for the bee. What's bad for the bee is bad for the hive. And this was a time of such immense cruelty and selfishness and indifference to what was happening elsewhere.

8:03And Marcus Reuss is saying, no, your job as a human being is to care about other human beings, not just the ones immediately nearest to you or related to you, but ones you'll never know, ones you'll never meet, ones who have never even been born. Stoicism does not make you a sociopath. If anything, it makes you care more about more people.

8:28At one point in meditations, Mark Cirillo says, avoid false friendship at all costs. He says, nothing is more painful. Nothing is worse. And he knows this from experience. I tell in Obstacle is the Way, the story of Marcus being betrayed by Avidius Cassius, his most trusted general, one of his best friends. He declares himself emperor. He essentially attempts to orchestrate a coup. Marcus Aurelius knew that although we wanted to be trusting of people, although we wanted to assume the best in people, we had to understand that people were not perfect. People could be led astray. People could have evil intentions in their heart.

9:03We have to be aware of this. We have to be prepared for it.

9:09Marcus Aurelius is clearly very strict with himself. Meditations is one rule, admonishment, almost impossible standard that he's setting for himself after another. And yet, we're told by historians, the brilliance of Marcus is that his strictness was limited solely to himself. And this was a deliberate thing by Marcus Aurelius. He says, tolerant with others, strict with yourself. He was conscious of the fact that it was called self-discipline for a reason. You control yourself, you control the standards you set for yourself, but you have to be tolerant and understanding of other people. And another part in meditations, he chastises himself for not being a better forgiver of faults.

9:44And that's what we have to cultivate. This practice should make us better, but also we're forgiving and tolerant of other people.

9:54A few years ago, a friend sent me an email, came in in the afternoon or the early evening on a Friday. I opened it and then I was like, you know what, I got a lot to deal with here. And I marked it as unread and I said, I'll get to it on Monday. and he dropped dead on a hike on Sunday. This is what the Stoics are talking about when they say memento mori, when they say you could leave life right now. And one of the most haunting passages of Marcus Aurelius, he talks about how as you tuck your child in at night, he says you should say to yourself, they will not make it to the morning. His point was meditating on the fact that this could be the last email that you get from this friend.

10:26This could be the last time you sit down to coffee. It could be the last family vacation that you ever go on for you or for them. And that we can't take people or places for granted. I don't think Marcus is doing this exercise, meditating on the loss of his child to disconnect, to detach from them. It's the opposite. It's to connect more deeply with them, to remind himself what was truly important, which was the present moment.

10:51One of the things you learn running a business is that even though you're in charge, you're not really in charge at all. You can't make anyone do anything. As part of the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, we interviewed all these experts, generals, head coaches, people who have seemingly real power over other people. And I said, can you make people do stuff? And they said, no, you can't make people do anything. That's not how life works. There's a great line from Eisenhower. I said, leadership is the art of making people do things because they think they want to do them, right? You don't force anyone to do anything.

11:22And so the stoic dichotomy of control is ultimately a critical lesson when you're running a business. You control what you do. You control what you say. You control the rules that you set, of course. You control the principles. you control the culture, but ultimately you don't make anyone do anything. You can try to lead by example, you can lead a horse to water. Force isn't going to work, commands don't really work. At the end of the day, you don't make anyone do anything. You can try to convince them, you can try to create a culture, a momentum, but if people don't want to get with the program, if people aren't on the same page with you, it's not about forcing them, it's not about incentives, it's about saying, hey, hey, you're not a right fit here.

12:01Let's find someone who is. You should go off and do something that's good for you where you want to do the things that the business needs you to do. And so I think ultimately, and this is a critical lesson because so many of the Stoics were in positions of power, is that ultimately you don't get to tell people what to do. That's a fantasy. It's an illusion. It's a chimera. You can try to convince them, but ultimately all we control as Stoics is ourselves, our own actions, our own decisions, our own emotions. And by the way, that's plenty to keep you busy.

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