It Could Just As Easily Be Us… | Stoicism's Formula For Building Resilience

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1:03Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

1:29It could just as easily be us. There were the big moments in history where the Stoics, men and women we admire, made the wrong call. Cato self-righteously turned down an alliance with Pompey and thus drove him into the arms of Caesar. We have a podcast about this, actually, tell the story and right thing right now as well. Seneca wavered, covered up, and continued to serve Nero. There's a great book about this by James Rom. Rusticus censored Justin Martyr to a gruesome death, a story I talk about in Lives of the Stoics, and Marcus Aurelius allowed for the persecutions of the Christians. In her fascinating book on Pontius Pilate, which I've been raving about, of course, and we've also had her on the podcast, Anne Rowe quotes the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair on what Pilate represents.

2:14He commands our moral attention, Blair explains, not because he was a bad man, because he was so nearly a good man. One can easily imagine him agonizing, seeing that Jesus had done nothing wrong and wishing to release him. Just as easily, however, one can envision Pilate's advisors telling him the risks, warning him not to cause a riot or inflame Jewish opinion. It is a timeless parable of political life. Seneca knowing that Nero was awful and unfit, but he told himself he was a moderating influence. Rusticus, whose story we tell in Lives of the Stoics, told himself that the law was the law and it was out of his hands.

2:52Cicero declined to pick a side in Rome's civil wars, putting his finger to the wind like a politician. These Stoics were tested and they made the wrong call. They command our moral attention because they could have done differently. We are them and they are us. Life puts us all in these situations, subjects us to these tests. Marx really said that what mattered was that we did the right thing. whether we were tired or hungry, cold or well-rested, despised or loved. But reality shows us how hard this actually is. Their example humbles us, teaches us, and most of all, shows us the costs of falling short.

3:40You have to have a physical practice. That doesn't seem like it's a philosophical idea, but it is. Socrates, the wisest, greatest philosopher who ever lived, he said, it's inexcusable for a citizen not to keep themselves in shape, to not be trained. And he meant that because you could get called up to military service at any moment, but also your family could need you, a stranger could need you. You had to have a strong mind and a strong body, he was saying. He said, also, it's disgraceful to become old and not know what your body is truly capable of. And in fact, all of the Stoics had a physical practice like this, something they did on a regular basis that challenged them.

4:20Marcus Aurelius hunted. He rode horses. There was a Stoic Chrysippus who was a distance runner. There was a Stoic Cleanthes who was a boxer. This is what a philosopher actually is, a hardy person, an active person, an engaged person, a person who has command of the greatest empire themselves. That's why Seneca said we treat the body rigorously so that it's not disobedient to the mind. I'm Ryan Holiday. I write books about philosophy, but I also train in philosophy in the sense that I'm always pushing myself physically. I'm trying to run or bike or swim or lift weights or do something really hard every single day.

4:55And this is part of my philosophical training, pushing myself physically, pushing myself mentally, taking care of myself, seeing what my body is capable of. That's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. The stoic art of discipline, of training, but also avoiding overtraining. The stoic practice of endurance. Also the stoic act of resilience, coming back from injury, recovering, pushing yourself. It's actually that latter part that I want to start with because I'm going through something right now myself that changed the course of this video. I wanted to do a video where I set a record with my mile time.

5:27I was I had to break five minutes with my mile again to get below five minutes. And I had plans for that. I've been training for it. I've been thinking about it. I could almost taste it. But then life, fortune, the Stokes would say, had very different plans for me.

5:43So what happened is I was running in Arizona. It was like five in the morning. I make it like two steps down the road and I go down super hard. There's rolling your ankle and then there's like hurting your ankle. And so I was like, oh, I just rolled it. and then I ran like five miles anyway. Yeah. And then, which was not smart, like the next day, it was like, I couldn't even get my shoe on. Yeah, man, that's bad. Yeah, it's the worst, because like you said, if you don't get to run, then it just totally messes with your energy and your mindset, and you're like, dude, I gotta find a way to work out.

6:12I think for me, very often, it takes more discipline to be like, it's not smart to do this. I'm going to rest than it does to - Yeah, power through. Yeah, yeah, like the default is doing it, which is good. You want to get to a place where the hard thing, the default is doing the hard thing. But then the problem is that can become its own bad habit. I wasn't feeling great anyway. I was like, I'm going to take a week off. So I took a week off. Then I biked like seven days later and I didn't feel anything. So I went running the next day. I got right back in the routine. And even though my foot had been all bruised from how I rolled the ankle, I thought I was better.

6:48There was a little bit of pain. I pushed through it and I thought all was well. and then about 10 or so days later, I'm walking down the stairs of my house. I make it down one stair of a two-stair flight of stairs, and I heard this snap, and my leg gave out, and I, like, I swear to God, I thought I would look down and see bone coming out of my leg. That's how bad it hurt, and I was screaming. I think I was mostly angry. I was, like, angry at myself because I knew I was seriously hurt in that moment. I knew I wasn't going to be running anytime soon, but most of all, I knew that I had done this to myself.

7:27Steinbeck has this great quote. He says, the ill discipline of overwork, the falsest of economies. You know, the stoic virtue of discipline, they rendered it as temperance or moderation. And that's what I had screwed up, right? I'd overtrained first and foremost. And then when I'd hurt myself, I hadn't listened to my body and I forced myself to get back to it before I was recovered. The result was now I was seriously injured and I ended up having to go to an orthopedist here in Texas who thankfully confirmed that the ankle wasn't broken. It was still swollen like 10 days after I got the x-ray.

8:03I had to do a bunch of physical therapy which is actually what I have to go do now. So not only am I not getting to work out, now I have to go do physical therapy to rehab this ankle and the worst part is that you know I also I mean there's a part of me I can tell why I forced it. I feel embarrassed just even going oh it's a sprained ankle like i would have almost rather be broken because it would give me an excuse all right so good news bad news a couple more weeks they said no running i don't have to wear this brace anymore i've got some acupuncture that that felt crazy i've got to do 60 double leg calf raises every day and 20 single leg balances every day i've hurt myself a lot.

8:45I've broken a lot of bones over the years. And if you had asked me, I would have swore to you this was broken just instantly. Sometimes you feel like you're going to tell. I think it surprised me. I mean, like when you're young, you're just used to your body doing what you want. And to have twice in such a short amount of time, the body just go, nope, sorry, for gravity to just take you and fling you around like a play thing. It's humbling. It's humbling. But this is something I'm going to have to take seriously. I'm going to have to train through. And then hopefully what I take from it, first off, just some appreciation and gratitude that I am mostly healthy and what these things, these activities mean for me.

9:24And then hopefully I learn some practices, some exercises that make me better, stronger, more resilient as I go forward. It's funny, as I was walking into physical therapy the other day, first time the woman was like, oh, are you a runner? And I said, how did you know? Is it like in my chart or something? She was like, No, I could tell from the shoes because I was wearing my Hokus, which I've been wearing all the time lately. Conceived in the mountains and designed to defy the odds, Hoka delivers an unprecedented combination of enhanced cushioning and support for uniquely smooth ride. That's what I always feel about them.

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10:31Run like race day every day. like if you listen to your body no one would ever run 50 or 100 or 200 miles right because the body is like this is a terrible idea definitely don't do this stop right now and do literally anything else so you question that but also when your body's like hey you're about to blow out your knee you know what i mean like how do you how do you know what to listen to and not listen to if you get in the habit of ignoring the test flags or if you start to view them all as these false positives, basically. Initially, so my first 100-mile attempt, I did not finish around mile 60.

11:14And after that, I had kind of the attitude of, I'll finish anything now. Like, I'm going to figure out this sport. I'm going to push through every situation because that first time I quit the race, I didn't need to. You know, those warning signs weren't anything different than what anyone feels at mile 60 out of 100 miles. It feels hard. And I kind of had a little like wondering or worry that I wouldn't notice the big flags when they showed up. Just a few years back, I did end up quitting a race due to injury. And those were all, you know, huge flags going up during the race that something not right was happening with my legs and that pushing past it wasn't, it wasn't the move to make if I wanted to keep enjoying this sport for many years to come.

12:06And so I was kind of reassured from that scenario of like, okay, you have been getting in tune with your body and learning it and you can trust yourself a little bit more to listen to those big flags. But it's so individual and so much of it is based on just like knowing yourself and knowing what the signs are and what you're even what those flags are even saying. I remember when I was riding the obstacles the way I was I was reading about this study they did on elite athletes in Canada. Basically they interviewed these world-class athletes that had suffered a severe injury. They looked at where they were many months later and obviously there's trauma that comes along with an injury.

12:46But what they found is that some of these athletes were better. They loved the game more. They fit in with their teammates more. They had more energy. Whatever the injury was, they may have still been struggling there. But there was what psychologists call post-traumatic growth associated with the injury. They had a bigger perspective. They had a different understanding of themselves. They appreciated things more. When I read that, I ended up including in the book and talking about it in the book. What I immediately appreciated about that was Something I'd experienced when I was writing my first book, trust me, I'm lying.

13:18I lived in New Orleans and I was riding my bike in the French Quarter down to the gym. I worked out at this place called the New Orleans Athletic Club almost every day. And I'm riding my bike down there and I get stuck in the street car track and I go over the handlebar and I shatter my left elbow. And I'm in a sling for like six weeks, something like that. And I couldn't type, right? And so I thought, oh, this is totally gonna screw up the book. It's gonna hold me back in so many ways. Not only because I couldn't physically use my hand to type very well, but because I couldn't work out. And I knew that was such a big part of my creative process.

13:51So what did I end up doing? I ended up taking lots of really long walks. I've walked every street in New Orleans multiple times. I walked for hours and hours and hours. And so this injury that I had, it prevented me from doing what I wanted to do. But in those long walks, in the delay that was caused to the book, I got this great advantage in that I got outside, to experience this new place in this new city but as i was walking i was also thinking and it totally changed how i thought about the book changed the ideas that went into the book it forced me to take the book slower so this idea that the obstacle is the way or there's such a thing as post-traumatic growth as well as post-traumatic stress i've personally experienced right i've been through that so then with this injury or any injury or any slowdown or any obstacle i try to remind myself there was this thing that happened that you thought was the worst thing that could have happened that you were so upset about that you were dreading and yet because you responded to it right you controlled yourself you were disciplined but also you were open to it you accepted your powerlessness over it and you worked with it you were able to make something good from it but in fact you can grow and change and be improved in ways that you couldn't have done otherwise and that's the blessing in it that's the good thing about it stressed out oh just found a nail on the road see if i hadn't had to go for my walk tonight i wouldn't have found this nail and maybe this nail would have popped someone's tire.

15:06And so that's just a good thing that happened from it. And I try to focus on that. That's the perspective I try to take on it. That's the lens I look at the situation. And more importantly, that's what I try to make true with the actions that I take. On December 7th, 2017, Ryan Shazier was playing, it was Monday Night Football. And he gets smacked and he gets laid out in the field. And by all appearances, he is paralyzed. The doctors thought he would never walk again. He spends months and months in the hospital. His NFL career is almost certainly over. Yeah, the use of his legs or any of his extremities is serious doubt.

15:44Many points in this journey. And at some point, one of the owners of the Steelers gave him a copy of The Obstacle is the Way. He reached out and asked if he could give Ryan my phone number. And we started texting back and forth. And it was this incredible experience for me because you're watching someone go through a real injury and real adversity. And as we talked, I had him on the Daily Soap podcast at one point, too. I remember he was telling me that and he was telling me that one of the things that he thought of in those sort of very dark days when he was wondering if he would walk again. But he had decided that he would walk again and that he would try to play again and that he would have a full and complete life despite this terrible setback or adversity.

16:22He was saying, you know, in football, you learn that football is a game of inches. And he said, I was just going to focus on getting to the next inch, the next inch. right? And cumulatively, you pile enough inches on top of each other, eventually you get yards, and eventually you can travel from one end of the field to the other, and you can score. This is actually something Mark Schruz talks about in meditations. He says, action by action, step by step. He says, this is how we assemble our life. No one can stop us from doing that sort of next little right thing. We don't know how long the recovery is going to take.

16:53We don't know what fully is or isn't possible, right? The doctors are saying, hey, you'll never walk again. Maybe you can walk again, but that's in the very distant future. Part of what in sports they call the process, but maybe in stoicism they call the logos. You just sort of trust the logos. You trust the process. You just do that little thing in front of you. You don't go, when is this going to be over? What's the resolution going to be? You're also not thinking backwards, like whose fault is this? How could it have been avoided? How unfair it is that it happened to me? You're just focused on doing that sort of next right thing.

17:26You see recovery, you see success as a game of inches. That's one of my favorite quotes from Zeno. He says, you know, well-being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing. And Ryan Shesu!

17:46I think one of the hardest stoic practices is this idea of acceptance, particularly if you're a strong-willed and ambitious person, a hard-driving person who has gotten past limitations or constraints, maybe even done things that people said is impossible, right? You're used to bending reality of the world, even your physical body, to your whim. But of course, as strong as any one person is, ultimately we're all powerless in the face of life, in the face of gravity, of injuries, the case of our own inevitable physical decline as we age. Mark Serios has this great passage I I've been thinking about doing the physical therapy thing, not getting to do this thing that I wanna do.

18:27Mark Surrealis talks about the sheer amount of unpleasantness we will put up with on doctor's orders, right? He says, if the doctor told you to do it, take this gross medicine, rest this way. We're like, okay, the doctor says I have to, so I have to. We would just do it. We don't fight against it. Mark Surrealis, the most powerful man in the world, has to take orders from his doctors in the same way that all of us ultimately have to submit, not just to doctors, but to the things that happen to us in life, the things that we don't have any control over. And so that too is a skill that you have to practice.

18:57And I feel silly, weird doing these physical therapy exercises, but the doctor said to do them. So spending my energy fighting it, I'm going with it. Taking the doctor's orders, because I got myself in this mess by ignoring medical advice and doctor's orders first go around. But I'm also saying I'm liking the chance to practice doing that.

19:21All right, first run on the ankle. Let's see how it goes.

19:31It didn't feel terrible, but it didn't feel amazing. I'm walking back and I'm going to wait and see. I'm going to use the discipline here to practice some patience as opposed to forcing it, learning my lesson a little bit. I'm reminded of this great passage from Seneca where Seneca says, you know, there's this word euthymia. And he said, euthymia is a sense of the path that you're on and not being misled by the paths that crisscross yours. He says, especially the paths of people who are lost. I think basically what he's saying is you've got to run your own race. You don't compare yourself to other people.

20:05This is a really important running lesson because when you're running, you want to go fast and you want to win. But really the race you're running against is yourself. And in this case, I'm definitely running against myself. I'm running against my ability to not do the thing, right? I'm trying to recover and I have to recover at my own pace per doctor's orders when my body's ready. So what other people are doing, how I normally run in this same distance or in this same place, all of it is irrelevant. I have to look at the instance as a totally unique set of circumstances. I have to not think about or care about what other people are doing.

20:36And I just have to do what I need to do in that moment and tune out the rest and not be misled by myself or the paths and the races of other people. When people find out that you're a runner, they always ask, are you training for a marathon? And the answer is no, I'm training for this. Running every day, that's the marathon. Running when you don't want to, running when you're tired, running when it's cold, running when it's hot, doing it, pushing yourself, that's the marathon. Seneca says we treat the body rigorously so that it's not disobedient to the mind. We're training ourselves, we're training our muscles literally, we're also building the muscle that makes us do stuff day to day, that runs the marathon of life.

21:17We're developing the ability to push ourselves, to demand stuff from ourselves, and that's the ultimate race. That's the competition, right? You're competing with yourself. You're competing with the desire to not do it. If you're competing with anyone, you're competing against all the people that are doing nothing, that are staying on the couch. Epictetus's great line was run races where winning is up to you. The race against yourself, the race against the desire to not do it, the race against the impulse to stay on the couch, that's where we're challenging ourselves. That's where we're pushing ourselves.

21:48That's the race that you're doing every single day. So that was my first five mile loop, the one I usually do. I can't say that I'm faster than I was before. I'm definitely not. It's probably 30 plus seconds a mile slower. I can't necessarily say I'm glad that all this happened, but I feel like I can say I'm better as a result of what happened. I had to reevaluate some stuff. I learned some new exercises. I had to focus on finding another outlet for that energy. I learned, again, a reminder about Festina Lente, make haste slowly. When you push a recovery faster than it should be, you are actually slowing things way, way down.

22:33And I think most importantly, I got a perspective. I was reminded, as those elite athletes were, what the sport means to me, what the practice means to me, the role that it plays in my life, and how I have to take care of it and take care of myself going forward. And I also, you know, you learn something about yourself bouncing back from an injury. You learn something about your pain tolerance. You learn something about your resilience. You learn something about your buoyancy and your determination. And I feel good about that. And now I'm going to work myself back, hopefully close to where I was before, hopefully faster.

23:07My goal this year had been to get my mile time under five minutes. Well, I am not even close to that right now, but it gives something to shoot for it's going to make it a tougher challenge and as a result i'll be better for having wrestled with it that's what the stoics say that when we're challenged we want to see life as having paired us with a strong sparring partner and we get better for that sparring for that wrestling for that challenge for getting thrown around for getting hurt for maybe even getting our ass beat and uh that's how i feel about it now i'll see you next time when i wrote the daily Stoic eight years ago, I had this crazy idea that I would just keep it going.

23:44The 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. No spam. You can unsubscribe whenever you want at dailystoic.com slash email.

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