It is Not a Fact | 6 Stoic Lessons for Living a Great Life

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: It's not a fact. It's bad, it's dangerous, it's awful, it's mean. But is it? How quickly we as the Noah Kahn lyric puts it state a feeling like a fact. We take our initial impression of something, our partial view of an entire event, past, present, future, and decide we know what this is. We no longer get curious about why someone acted the way they did or why something happened the way that it did. We know because we can feel it. We take a strong stance on an issue without taking time to understand what it means, what caused it, who it affects or its impacts. We immediately jump to a negative conclusion instead of asking ourselves what we might be missing.

0:57Ryan Holiday: This is madness, the Stoics remind us. It's misery. Our feelings are not only not facts, most of the time they're wrong. When we decide our emotional reaction is the truth, curiosity disappears. Humility disappears. Patience disappears. We stop trying to understand. We stop listening. We stop seeing things as they truly are. So instead of mistaking feelings for facts, let's pause. Let's get curious. Let's be humble. Let's be patient. Because the way we feel about something in the moment is rarely, if ever, a fact.

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2:56Ryan Holiday: Terms and conditions apply. The painted porch at my bookstore here in Bastrop, Texas has a porch on the back and it is painted. We actually just repainted it. And then we were sort of trying to fix it up a little bit. It's been sort of an afterthought, but we're trying to make it a little bit nicer. And we bought some new outdoor furniture, some chairs, a rug, some string lights, you know, just some stuff that the employees and I myself can hang out on. You know, this is the best time of year in Texas. It's cool and nice. Days are still long, but not so long. Anyways, where'd we get all the furniture?

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4:10Ryan Holiday: One of the best stories in all of Stoicism comes at the founding of Stoicism. Zeno, he's this successful merchant. He comes from a long family of merchants. And he suffers a shipwreck and he loses everything. He washes up in Athens. He has nothing. And there he discovers philosophy. That's how Stoicism starts. And so reflecting on this journey, this thing that he never would have wished happening, changing the entire course of his life and now history, we wouldn't be talking had he not gone through this. He says, I made a prosperous voyage when I suffered a shipwreck. meaning the worst thing that ever happened to him was actually the best thing that ever happened to him.

4:43Ryan Holiday: And that's what a Stoic says. We don't control what happens. Bad stuff is going to happen, but we control how we respond to it. We control what we turn it into. And whatever it is, whatever metaphorical shipwreck you're going through, you can make it a prosperous voyage if you think about it that way.

5:00Ryan Holiday: The Stoics have this line, they go like, if you don't know what port you're sailing towards, no wind is favorable. You have to know where you want to go. And this is really true even for successful people. Like if you don't know where your stopping point is, what you want your life to look like, now all of a sudden, you're in this wonderful fortunate position where people are like, hey, you want to do this? Do you want to do this? They're offering me this. Do you want to take this amount of money to do this or more money to do this? And if you don't know what's important to you, what kind of work you want to do, what you want your life to look like, you end up defaulting to one of two things.

5:33Ryan Holiday: What pays most or what are other people doing? Those are not the worst proxies in the world, like it's better than no proxy, but you can end up very far from what you actually want. And you'll only know that when you get there. So you have to have a very clear sense of where you're trying to go. Or these things, these opportunities are really chances to get super off track.

6:00Ryan Holiday: You've got to blow your own nose. To me, that's the core idea of stoicism. Nobody's coming to save you. Nobody can handle this for you. You're not magically going to get better on your own. Your problems aren't going to solve themselves on their own. You've got to do it. You've got to make the changes. If you want to be beautiful, Epictetus says make beautiful choices. Work on getting better. Focus on getting better. Focus on what you can do today. That's how you solve your problem. Step by step, action by action. As Mark Spreely said, that's how we improve day by day. by making the little choices, the little actions, not by waiting for other people to save us, but by blowing our own nose, getting active in our own rescue.

6:47Ryan Holiday: You have to be strict with yourself, but tolerant with others. Marcus really struggles with this his whole life. It's why he writes about it in meditations. He has these exacting high standards. He thinks that the right thing is not just everything, it's the only thing. And yet he works really hard to remind himself that it's called self-discipline for a reason. It's not a thing you get to project on other people. You don't get to go around insisting other people follow your standards, your code. And this is a thing that disciplined people have struggled with for all time. There's even a saying in ancient Rome, we can't all be Cato's.

7:23Ryan Holiday: Kobe Bryant went through the same thing. He couldn't wrap his head around the fact that not everyone else was Kobe Bryant. So this idea that we can be as strict with ourselves as we want to be, but we have to be tolerant and accepting and encouraging and forgiving of other people because they don't have the gifts we have. They don't have the drive that we have. Most importantly, they never agreed to sign up to the code or standards that we have set for ourselves.

7:51Ryan Holiday: There's an amazing story about Marcus Relis. He didn't want to be emperor. In fact, when he's given the news, he's to be adopted by the Emperor Hadrian. He weeps because he thinks of all the bad kings of history. So Marcus was scared. Maybe he had a little bit of imposter syndrome like you and I have. But the night before he's to ascend the throne, Marcus Relius has a dream. And in the dream, he feels that his shoulders are made of ivory. And that's how he knows. He knows he's strong enough to bear the weight. He can carry the load. He can do this. and you have to know you have shoulders of ivory too you're stronger than you know you're stronger than people think you've got this you can do it you have shoulders made of ivory we all do because we've done the work because we've been training because we've been watching videos we've been working up till this moment and now it's here and we're ready to do it

8:44Ryan Holiday: Marcus Reelius writes to himself he says fight to be the person philosophy wants you to be And I just love that so much. It's that Stoicism has this ideal for you to be someone who's resilient, someone who's strong, someone who's virtuous, someone who's kind, who cares about the common good, someone who isn't easily rattled, someone who's committed to bettering themselves. That's what Stoicism wants for you. That's what the Stoics have been writing about for centuries. That's what we do in these videos and the Daily Stoic email. That's the ideal. But the question is are you fighting for yourself?

9:18Ryan Holiday: Are you fighting to be that thing? Are you striving today to get a little bit closer to that perfect ideal? Are you fighting for yourself? The Stoics can't make you be or do anything. They can just lay out the formula, but it's ultimately on you to follow it, to step up and actually be it. That's what I want you to think about today.