It Has Always Been This Way (And We Have Always Known It) | The Untold Struggle of Florence Nightingale

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 for 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.

0:35Ryan 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. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

1:09Ryan Holiday: It has always been this way, and we have always known it. We think it was so different back then. People spoke different languages, did different things, lived in different ways. The past was long ago. It was strange. It was dangerous. It was weird. But as Ecclesiastes reminds us, there is no new thing under the sun. What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. And we keep forgetting that this is true. While a lot of history can look very different from the present, the people who lived it are very much like we are today. They had the same wants, same desires, same fears and insecurities that we do.

1:51Ryan Holiday: As Marcus Aurelius said, of the age of Vespasian, roughly 90 years before his own, the world was then as now. People doing the exact same things, marrying, raising children, getting sick, dying, waging war, throwing parties, doing business, farming, flattering, boasting, distrusting, plotting, hoping others will die, complaining about their own lives, falling in love, putting away money, seeking high office and power. And Marcus Aurelius was hardly the only one to notice this. Centuries later, the historian Francesco Giocardini observed much the same thing in his maxims and reflections. Everything that has been in the past and is in the present will be in the future, he wrote, but the names and appearances of things change so that he who has not a discerning eye will not recognize them.

2:40Ryan Holiday: We have always been this way, and apparently we've always been prone to forgetting that we have always been this way. Every generation thinks its problems are new and unprecedented. Its fears are new. Its circumstances are uniquely different. Then we read Ecclesiastes, we read Marcus, we read history, and we discover once again there is nothing new under the sun.

3:12Ryan Holiday: Florence Nightingale, one of the pioneers of modern medicine, she's born to a rich Victorian family. And the expectation for a young, wealthy woman of means and status at that time was basically nothing. The expectation was that she could and should do nothing. But she has some sense that she is different. Although she grows up amidst wealth and privilege, she feels called to help other people, to be of service. There's a famous drawing that one of her aunts does where although her older sister is gripping tightly to the hand of their parents, Florence Nightingale is stumping along by herself, going her own way.

3:52Ryan Holiday: And yet, as she feels called to nursing, things keep getting in the way of her pursuing that call. What people think, what her parents want, the trips they want to go on, the parties she's supposed to attend. And so for many, many years, she ignores this call. She gets the call. She knows she should do something. And she tries to inquire about it. She tries to take some steps towards it. And every time she does, it's shut down. And this is an urgent call at this time. You were more likely to die in a hospital than outside of it. more soldiers died, not on the battlefield, but in the hospitals, because they had such a primitive understanding of medicine.

4:33Ryan Holiday: Florence would later write that medicine at that time had to come up with the idea of first do no harm, because the default was that they did do harm. And there was this sense that medicine simply took care of itself. And it wasn't. It wasn't scientific. It wasn't rigorous and it often did more harm than good. And yet something got between her and pursuing this thing, which she was smart enough to do, which she was capable, which she did have all these ideas. So she gets the first call and she ignores it. And then about eight years later, she gets this call again. This time she thinks it's a religious call.

5:11Ryan Holiday: And the call says, are you going to let reputation hold you back from service? and yet even here she wavers again like so many of us the answer is yes there are things we could do there are things we should do there's a difference we could make there's an impact we could have but then we wonder how we're going to look we wonder what other people are going to say we wonder if it's going to be hard we wonder if it's going to work and then we don't do anything actually i'm sure many of you here are familiar with the idea of the hero's journey it's in the hero's journey, right? You have the ordinary world.

5:43Ryan Holiday: This is regular life. You have the call to adventure. What does every hero do after the call to adventure? They refuse the call. We come up with reasons. We come up with excuses. We say, I'm going to do it later. I'm going to do it when I'm more secure, right? I'm going to do it when my kids are out of school. I'm going to do it when I'm older. We've been saying since the pandemic, when things go back to normal, or we say, I hope someone else takes care of it. It's not me that can do this, right? So we come up with these reasons why we don't put ourselves out there and this fear, it holds us back.

6:17Ryan Holiday: And ultimately, Florence Lango gets over this. It's delayed and deferred, but not forever. And she realizes eventually that this is a responsibility that she's going to have to take. No one's going to give her permission, right? No one's going to throw her a parade. That happens later. And she He says, I must expect no sympathy or help. I must take it. It will not be given to me. And the idea of courage ultimately is that you have to push past this fear. If it was easy, if it was guaranteed, everyone would do it. So you push past the fear. You have to go for what you want. And it's good that things are scary, right?

6:54Ryan Holiday: It's good that they're hard. You could argue that it keeps others out and away. Again, if it was easy, if it was guaranteed, if you could see how it was going to go, wouldn't be scary and everyone would do it. And so it takes courage to put yourself out there, to be unique, right? To be yourself.

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