In The Resolute Urgency of Now | Finding The Right Mentors

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:14Ryan Holiday: In the resolute urgency of now. We could do it later. We could get serious later. We could wait for things to settle down. We could wait for better terms. We could wait until we feel better. But why? Why not do it while we have the chance? Why not get it started? Why not get it over with? The Smashing Pumpkins famously sang about the resolute urgency of now. That is what we face. That is what is slipping away from us. The future lies in uncertainty, Seneca said, so we must live immediately. We have to match the swiftness of time, he believed, with the quickness of our own action and our own choice.

0:55Ryan Holiday: We do not have the luxury of dragging our feet or putting things off, or we will be passed by and miss our opportunity. Today is for certain. Today is before you. Things are settled enough. You must be serious now. This is your chance.

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2:39All right.

2:40Ryan Holiday: So I got these two talks in Portland and San Francisco in early June, and I got to figure out what I'm going to wear. You know, normally I just wear a heavy metal shirt and running shorts or something, but I can't do that on stage. I can't wear the same stuff on stage for all of the events because it would screw up the video. And that's why I'm shopping on quince right now. I want something that looks good on stage that I'm not going to sweat through. It's not going to get super wrinkled. Quince has got great t-shirts. They've got great light sweaters and everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80 % less than similar brands.

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3:54Ryan Holiday: Finding the right mentors. Today's entry is a quote from Seneca on his essay on the shortness of life, which is one of my all-time favorite quotes from Seneca. He says, we like to say that we don't get to choose our parents, that they were given to us by chance, yet we can truly choose whose children we would like to be. I just love that quote so much because to me, that's what I've done in my life. I've picked who my ancestors are, who my parents are. I'll get into more of that in a minute. Let me give you the meditation today. We are fortunate enough that some of the greatest men and women in history have recorded their wisdom and folly in books and journals.

4:31Ryan Holiday: Many others have had their lives chronicled by careful biographers from Plutarch to Boswell to Robert Caro. The literature available at your average library amounts to millions of pages and thousands of years of knowledge, insight, and experience. Maybe your parents were poor role models or you lacked a great mentor. Yet if we choose to, we can easily access the wisdom of those who came before us, those whom we aspire to be like. We not only owe it to ourselves to seek out this hard-won knowledge, we owe it to the people who took the time to record their experiences to try to carry on the traditions and follow their examples, to be the promising children of these noble parents.

5:10Ryan Holiday: We all have positive ancestors and negative ancestors. We have who from our family line we're going to choose. I think we have a story about this in The Daily Dad. I noticed it when I was researching Florence Nightingale for Courage is Calling. Her parents were sort of these spoiled, sensitive, rich people who didn't really do anything. So it might seem out of step or the apple falling far from the tree that Florence Nightingale became this powerhouse in nursing, does all this charitable work. But actually, when you look at her grandfather and great-grandfather and many other relatives, it was her parents who were not the norm.

5:51Ryan Holiday: It was a family of giving and service and actually courage and all these other wonderful traits. And so we all have that in our family. We get to choose. I'm just reading this biography of Ben Franklin right now. And Ben Franklin has this incredible experience where he just never felt like his father's son. He was so different than his dad. And then he goes to England and he visits where his family is from. And he learns that his uncle died on the very day that Franklin was born, separated by a couple of years, but they shared, it was like four years. But his family saw how similar Franklin was to his late uncle.

6:28Ryan Holiday: And they came to think that he was the reincarnation of that spirit. The idea being like we get to choose whose spirit we're going to carry. You're not actually related to Seneca. You're not actually related to Marcus Aurelius or any of your heroes probably, right? Not all of us come from really impressive families. Maybe everyone we're related to is normal. Maybe everyone we are related to is meh. But we can choose whose children we would like to be. We could be the descendants of the Stoics. We can walk in the tradition, the footsteps of these great people. Martin Luther King has no relationship to Gandhi, but he is in a way Gandhi's protege, the culmination of what Gandhi pioneered.

7:11Ryan Holiday: And we can be that. We can choose whose children we're going to be, and that's what Seneca is saying. And in fact, Seneca's brother embodies this. In Roman times, it was very common for adults to be adopted by other adults if a family didn't have an heir. This is Marcus Aurelius and Antoninus and Hadrian. And Marcus is very similar to Antoninus, not like Hadrian at all. He chooses to embrace the stepfather-ness, right? And Seneca's brother is in the Bible as Gaio. He changes his name when he's adopted by this family, and he was a great man. So the idea, who are we going to choose to be descended from?

7:47Ryan Holiday: Whose example are we going to follow? Whose blood are we going to have running through our veins? Not literally, but figuratively, because that's what matters. And it matters what we do with it. It matters if we live up to that example. It matters if we make them proud, not whether they actually know we exist or not, not whether they anoint us their legal heirs. What matters is if we act as if, and that's what today's entry is about. Hey there, just a heads up. I'm going to be on tour this summer and fall. You can come see me in San Francisco and Portland in June. You can see me in Australia and New Zealand in October, in August.

8:25Ryan Holiday: I'm mixing my months up here, but in August, you can see me in Chicago and Minneapolis and Detroit. Then I'll be on the East Coast sometime in November and December. Anyways, grab tickets to that, dailystoiclive.com. Hope to see you there.

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