It’s Always The Right Time To Do The Right Thing | Epictetus' Guide To A Better Life

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0:54It's always the right time to do the right thing. He could have waited. He could have gotten the land cleared. He could have waited until he was on firmer financial footing. He could have waited until his children were older. There were a million reasons that Ulysses S. Grant could have rationalized holding on to the slave that his father-in-law had given him. His family was in desperate straits. Could have worked out a deal with William Jones, the slave, to earn his freedom. He could have told himself that he was one of the kinder owners and that the problem with slavery wasn't people like him but monsters further south.

1:31He could have ruminated on the dilemma for months, turning it over a thousand times in his mind. all the while benefiting from the labor they needed for the farm. But as we tell the story in Right Thing Right Now, Ulysses S. Grant made the expensive decision to do the right thing. He granted Jones their freedom on March 29, 1859. He was opposed to slavery. He didn't want to be a part of it, so he decided not to be. Look, there is always going to be a way for us to delay doing what needs to be done. There is always an excuse, a rationalization, a reason. We tell ourselves it's not that bad. We tell ourselves we need to wait until we're more secure.

2:11We distract ourselves with busyness, with edge cases, with debate. We just need more time or energy, we tell ourselves. Could be good today, Mark Sreelius writes in meditations, who it's worth noting did not free his slaves. Instead, you choose tomorrow. The right time to do the hard thing, the courageous thing, the right thing, it's right now, not later, not tomorrow, now. And this is partly what formed the title. This is a story from Right Thing Right Now, my third book in the Stoic Virtue series, Courage, Discipline, Justice, and now Wisdom. If you haven't read Right Thing Right Now, you can pick up signed copies in the Daily Stoic store or at the Painted Porch.

2:58And it's just in time for you to read that book because the new book, the final book in the series, Wisdom Takes Work, is coming out in October. And actually, we've got a cool set of all four books, signed, numbered, limited edition, first editions. You can grab all those. I'll link to that in today's show notes. We're definitely going to run out of this box set. That's dailystoic.com slash stoic virtues. You can pre-order Wisdom Takes Work at dailystoic.com slash pre-order. Really proud of this series. It's one of my favorite stories. I talked about it with Ron Chernow when he was on the podcast.

3:33I hope if you're thinking about something, if you've got one of those tough, right decisions you have to make, I hope you can make it now.

3:49This is one of the greatest books ever written. The private thoughts of the most powerful man in the world, a glimpse into the ancient past, and yet it would not exist without this book, the lectures of a Greek slave in the Roman Empire. I'm talking about Marcus Aurelius' meditations, which is made possible by the discourses of Epictetus.

4:12So who is Epictetus? We don't know a lot about where he's from. We know he's born into slavery around the year 55 AD in Heropolis, which is now in modern day Turkey. But at the time, this is part of the sprawling Roman Empire, an empire of brutal laws and exploitation, where prisoners of war and foreigners are often turned into slaves. One of these laws actually enacted under the Emperor Augustus made it impossible for slaves to be freed before their 30th birthday. And so as a young man, Epictetus, born into slavery, as I said, his name just means acquired one. He is purchased by a secretary of Nero.

4:55So this would have been a powerful man in Nero's court. And so Epictetus isn't working in the fields or in the mines. He is in the heart of the Roman Empire. He is up close and personal with powerful, important, rich, famous people. And so he is experiencing powerlessness and yet living and seeing on a daily basis incredible luxury and privilege. Epictetus might even have met Seneca, another famous Stoic who is there in Nero's court. In any case, they're existing in the same scene at the same time, but experiencing it from vastly different perspectives. And yet, despite this powerlessness, despite this loss of freedom, through the force of his intellect and his philosophy and his character, Epictetus is able to free himself, find freedom inside slavery.

5:48And he becomes the embodiment for the Stoics of how we always have the ability to respond to fate, how it doesn't matter what we bear, but how we bear it. Epictetus does have a different slice of Roman slavery, but by all accounts, His time in slavery is grim. We're told that Epictetus' owner is violent and cruel. We're told a story of him sadistically twisting Epictetus' leg as a form of punishment or entertainment when Epictetus is young. And we're told Epictetus is warning him, you have to stop. You're going too far. My leg is going to break. And finally, the leg does break. And Epictetus doesn't scream or cry.

6:30he just looks at his master and says didn't i warn you and i think this gives us a glimpse into who epictetus was someone who at a shockingly young age has mastered himself and his emotions a stoic in the lowercase sense first and foremost and we also see how this injury this experience shapes epictetus because he returns to it repeatedly in his writings he says in many different iterations, that basically this disability, this handicap, this lameness that he has, he loses the ability to use his leg fully, that it impedes him physically, but not mentally. He says lameness is an impediment to the leg, not to the mind.

7:10He doesn't see himself as disabled. He doesn't see that anything has been taken from him. He just sees an objective fact. The injury is, for Epictetus, a kind of philosophical lesson that the mind is separate from the body, that it is higher than the body, that the body can be wounded, but the mind retains the power to decide what that means and how to respond. And now we don't know how Epictetus first encounters philosophy, who introduces him to Stoicism. We do know that he trains under and is taught by Musonius Rufus, a Roman Stoic sometimes known as the Roman Socrates for his wisdom and eloquence and brilliance.

7:47And so Epictetus becomes one of the star pupils. And when he is free, he likely remains close to Musonius. He may have even been exiled with him. And so the two have this lifelong relationship of master and student. And eventually Epictetus begins to teach on his own. He opens a philosophy school in Nicopolis, and he becomes not just a respected philosopher and philosophy teacher, but one that wealthy Romans send their sons and daughters to. And Epictetus influences countless students, students from all over the empire. And again, it is just a remarkable thing. This man born into anonymity, into slavery, into hardship, who has a rough go at it, becomes a beacon of wisdom, of self-sufficiency and resilience, but most of all freedom.

8:32And that is why we have to study and learn from it.

8:42We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone. And then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that. But I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author. and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

9:17My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for Good Inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It Over the Holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr.

9:54Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And And daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events. Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house.

10:35It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course.

11:16Because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours.

11:46Habitus has a great line that I think captures both how we're supposed to think about Stoic philosophy, but also what his writings serve best. and I actually have it on the back of the Daily Stoic Journal. He says, every day and night keep thoughts like these at hand, write them, read them aloud, talk to yourself and others about them. So we want to think of Stoic philosophy and particularly the writings of Epictetus as something you return to, you riff on, you're incorporating into your life, into your own thinking. And if you've read Meditations, and I have another video about that, Marcus Aurelius is doing this.

12:21In fact, several quotes and exercises that survived to us from Epictetus come to us through Marcus Aurelius, who was so intimately familiar with Epictetus that he's citing and quoting him from memory. Let's talk about what Epictetus talks about. Epictetus says that the first task in life, the first job of the philosopher, he says, is to separate matters into two buckets, what's in our control and what's not in our control. This exercise, what we call the dichotomy of control, is really at the core of Epictetus' teachings. Is it up to me? Is it not up to me? If it's up to me, it gets my attention, my energy, my focus.

13:01If it's not up to me, I try not to think about it. I try not to put energy or emotion towards it. But the truth is, so much of what we spend time on is not in our control. He says some things aren't in our control and others are not. He says things in our control are our opinions, our pursuits, our desires, our aversions. or in a word, our own actions. Now, what's not in our control, he says, is our body, our property, our reputation, commands, in one word, things that are not our own action. Now, try to think about where this is coming from. This isn't just like some guy sitting in a mansion, just riffing on big ideas the way that some of the other ancient philosophers were.

13:39When he's saying your body is not in your control, he's saying this from the perspective of a person who was owned by other people and had his legs broken by those people. But he came to understand that even in the confines of slavery, what's up to him are his decisions, his actions, his thoughts, and everything else was not up to him. And so when we separate things, it winnows what there is to focus on. Epictetus believed that as powerless as we were over external conditions, we always have the ability to choose how we respond to those conditions. He says, you can bind up my leg, but not even Zeus can take away my power of choice.

14:23And then he says later, which I love, and this is an important tag to that. He says, if we want to be beautiful, make beautiful choices. So for Epictetus, it's all about choice. And I love this so much because he was a guy who, for much of his existence, had very little choice about where he lived, what he did, what people did to him. But he always focused inside that on where his choices were. He says, it's not things that upset us, it's our judgment about things. A few years ago, I gave a talk to the Pittsburgh Pirates, and as I walked into their practicability in Braindon, Florida, they actually had this on the wall.

14:56They said, it's not things that upset us, it's our opinion about things. They didn't know that this came from Epictetus, but it does. And I think that's so cool. The idea being that we control our thoughts and opinions. Everything else is objective and outside of us. And so we decide. He talks about this specifically in regards to being offended. He says, when someone provokes you, understand that you are complicit in getting upset. He says, we shouldn't respond immediately. We should take a moment to react. We should regain control. But the idea is that nobody is responsible for your emotions, for your feelings, but yourself.

15:35Another person can't make you angry. Another person can't offend you. Another person can't hurt your feelings. Another person can't frustrate you. This is something that you have the power over. Now, other people can do bad things. They can do cruel things. They can do stupid things. They can do things you don't like, but we control how we respond to those things. Most importantly, we control our emotions in response to those things. I think running through Epictetus's philosophy is the idea of intellectual humility. And you can get the sense he was bumping up against, you know sort of best and the brightest of young roman life so a lot of egotistical kids a lot of kids who've been coddled a lot of kids who thought they were geniuses but he says look it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know he says it doesn't matter that you read it matters what you read it matters how you read he says don't just tell me that you've read books he says show me what you have learned by thinking better.

16:35And he says, look, to get better, you have to be willing to look not good, right? He says, if you wish to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid, right? Not only can you not learn what you think you already know, if you're not willing to admit that you don't know something, right? If you're not willing to ask questions, if you're not willing to be bad at something, you will never get good at that thing. You will never get better. And I think this pertains to another important thing where Epictetus is saying, look, when you're grounded in life, when you know what's important, when you only focus on what you control, you don't care what other people think.

17:07You don't look outside yourself for approval. You don't care what your teacher thinks. You don't care what your classmates think. You don't care what anyone thinks. You're focused on yourself. But ultimately for Epictetus, philosophy was not a parlor trick. It was not intellectual exercises. Unlike Seneca, unlike Marcus Rios, he wasn't writing these things in pseudo-retirement, he didn't get to go to the best schools, he wasn't anything even like his rich and successful students. Epictetus had a really, really hard life. So for him philosophy was a coping mechanism, it was something that got you through the worst things that we can experience as human beings.

17:46And so basically he says the equivalent to the don't talk about it, be about it. He says don't talk about your philosophy, embody it. And I think it says something that Epictetus didn't write anything down. And yet he comes to us all these thousands of years later because he embodied his teachings most of all. Yes, his students jotted down what those teachings were, but the power of them was who he was as a person. Epictetus, you know, is obviously around the richest and most successful Romans. He sees in Nero's court, one guy go to Nero one day and go, Nero, I'm down to my last million dollars.

18:22And Nero says, oh my God, how have you survived? And Epictetus sees that even these successful, rich people are actually quite poor because they want more always, because they're insatiable, and because they don't know what's actually important. He says, it is better to starve to death in a calm and confident state of mind than to live anxiously amidst abundance. And I think that's what he's seeing in Nero's palace every day. That Nero isn't someone to admire or to be jealous of. That Epictetus is actually freer than the most powerful man in the world because Epictetus is in command of himself.

18:58And I think opting out of this competition is a big part of it. Epictetus is again saying by focusing on what you control, you decide what success is. He says you can always win if you only enter competitions where winning is up to you. And he says the only way to achieve this is by despising things that are not up to us. What I think he means is, look, for me as a writer, for me making this video, if I care about how many views it does, if I care about how many copies I sell or what awards I win, then I've handed over the approval to something that I don't control. Success is now whether something breaks my way that's not up to me.

19:34Now, if I focus instead on whether I did my best possible job, if I focus on the part of it that's in my control, then I can always win that competition if I show up, if I do my work. And when we think about Epictetus's life, this hard, brutal existence of slavery, how does he endure it? Part of it is by having his eyes wide open. He's not naive. He says, set before your eyes every day death and exile and everything else that looks terrible, especially death, and you will never have any mean thought or be too keen on anything. And actually, Mark Surrealis gets, I think, one of the most haunting exercises in all of stoic philosophy from Epictetus, which is saying that even as you tuck your children in tonight, say to yourself they may not survive till morning.

20:15Now, does this mean that you're not attached to them, you don't love them? No, I think it's that you're not taking them for granted. He says you do not possess the precious people in your life, and I think that's a really important way to think about it. There is a funny story about Epictetus. One night he's in his house and he hears someone breaking in, and he rushes downstairs, and they've stolen his most valuable possession this this silver lamp and he says ah epictetus this is your fault you possess this expensive thing tomorrow you will go down and buy a cheaper lamp you can only lose what you have and uh i just love the idea that he's a philosopher he says not to be attached but then he has this thing that he's attached to it gets stolen but instead of crying about instead of whining about it just says let's get a cheaper one and let's not worry about it so much epictetus you know just knows that doing the right thing is sometimes going to be judged but if it's worth doing if you've committed to doing it you shouldn't care what other people think he says whenever you do something you have decided ought to be done never try to avoid being seen doing it even if people in general may disapprove of it if of course your action is wrong don't do it at all but if it's right why be afraid of people whose criticism is off the mark and as we said you don't care about other people's criticism because it's not in your control it doesn't change you it doesn't affect you it's outside you what matters is did you think this was something that needed to be done if so you should do it to your app to the absolute best of your ability and if we think about the injustices that epictetus endures it makes this quote which is one of my favorites even more admirable he says until you know their reasons how do you know whether they've acted wrongly the point is people are often doing what they think is right or what they haven't thought about at all and to take it personally, to assume the worst, to add judgment on top of it, right?

22:04That's what upsets us, right? It's not things that upset us, it's our judgment about things. So when we add to it, they did it because they hate me, they did it because they don't like me, they did it because they're trying to be cruel, they did it because they're an awful person. These judgments make hard things harder. So as Epictetus gets smarter and wiser and better, how does he know or how does he measure the progress of his students? He says, the sign of a person making progress in philosophy is this, criticizing nobody, praising nobody, blaming nobody, accusing nobody, saying nothing about oneself to indicate being someone or knowing something.

22:38And he says, whenever such a person is frustrated or impeded, he accuses himself. If he is complimented, he laughs to himself. And if he's criticized, he doesn't defend himself. And again, talking about progress, he says, let's see some evidence of your progress. It's as if I were to say to an athlete, show me your shoulders. And he responded, have a look at my weights. Get out of here with your giant weights, I'd say. What I don't want to see is the weights, but how you've profited from using them. So again, don't talk about it, be about it. And again, I think that's what makes Epictetus so great.

23:09It's not what he said, it's that he endured something that almost none of the other stoics would have possibly been able to endure. But how do we balance caring what's in our control and not in our control, but then still go through the world? He says, it isn't easy to combine and reconcile the two, the carefulness of a person devoted to externals and the dignity of one who's detached, but it's not impossible. Otherwise, happiness would be impossible. He said, it's like going on an ocean voyage. What can I do? I can pick the captain, the boat, the date, and the best time to sail. But then a storm hits.

23:42Well, that it's no longer my business. I've done everything I could. Somebody else's problem now, namely the captain's. He says, but what if the boat starts to sink? What are my options? The only thing I'm in a position to do, drown, but fearlessly without bawling or crying out to God because I know that what is born must also die. I don't know. I guess I would say you could also swim, right? But I think he's implying that that's outside your control at this point. You know, he's basically saying we work with the material we're given. We try to make the best of every situation, but sometimes all we can do is practice the art of acquiescence, right?

24:16The acceptance of things outside our control, which is actually something Marcus takes from Epictetus as well. In book three of Discourses, one of my favorite chapters, he says, every circumstances represents an opportunity. Being healthy is good. Being sick is bad. No. Enjoying health in the right way is good. Making bad use of your health is bad. So even illness can benefit us? Why not? If even death and disability can't. So it's possible to benefit from bad circumstances? Yes, from every circumstances, even abuse and slander. A boxer derives the greatest advantage from his sparring partner.

24:54And he says, when you are struggling in life, when you're going through something difficult, think about it as if life has paired you with a strong sparring partner, and that's how you become a better boxer and fighter. And then we get to just some fragments of Epictetus, which I'll riff on with you real quick. Whoever chafes at the conditions dealt by fate is unskilled in the art of life. Whoever bears them nobly and makes wise use of the results is a man who deserves to be considered good. Epictetus would say that there are two vices more blacker and serious than the rest, lack of persistence and lack of self-control.

25:29To blame oneself is a proof of progress, but the wise man never has to blame another or himself. Don't hope that events will turn out the way you want. welcome events in whichever way they happen, this is the path to peace. And then this is my favorite exercise from Epictetus. He says, every circumstances has two handles, with one of which you can hold while another is insupportable. If your brother mistreats you, don't try to come to grips with it by dwelling on the wrong he's done, because that approach makes it unbearable. Remind yourself that he's your brother, that you grew up together, and that you'll find you can bear it.

26:05The idea that every situation has two handles. We decide how we're going to see things. We decide what response we're going to make of them. That is the essence of stoic philosophy.

26:18In 1962, Commander James Stockdale is sent to Stanford by the Navy. It might seem weird that the Navy would send a fighter pilot to get a degree in the humanities, but they did. Stockdale is walking the halls of Stanford's philosophy department one day, old enough to be confused for a professor and not a student, when he bumps into a man named Professor Reinholder. Reinholder having served in the Navy himself during World War II. And they get to talking, and Reinholder asks him if he's read Epictetus, and Stockdale hasn't. And so he walks back to his office, and he grabs this book off of his shelf.

26:57This is a translation of Epictetus's In Caridian, translated by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an abolitionist and civil war veteran who actually leads the first black troops in the American Civil War. And it gives him this book, a book that changes the course of Stockdale's life, because just a few months later, Stockdale would be shot down over North Vietnam, where he would spend something like seven years being tortured, placed in solitary confinement, and otherwise having his freedom stolen from him. Epictetus, it turns out, is the perfect philosophy teacher for James Stockdale because Epictetus is a slave in the Roman Empire.

27:40Epictetus loses the full use of his leg under torture from his master, just as Stockdale would lose the use of his leg under torture. Actually, as Stockdale is being shot down, parachuting down into Vietnam, he says to himself, I am leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus. One of his incredible essays in books is actually called Courage Under Fire, Testing Epictetus's Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior. There in the prison camps of North Vietnam, Stockdale is having to put Epictetus's teachings into practice. This is where he ceases to study the philosophy.

28:22As Epictetus said, that we don't talk about the philosophy, we have to embody it. And this is Stockdale's chance to do that. He's one of the highest ranking prisoners in that prison camp, and he has to lead not just himself through this ordeal, but lead the hundreds of other men through it as well. Actually, I sat in this very studio. I interviewed Dave Carey, who was a POW. He tells me the story about Stockdale tapping on the wall, a reminder from Epictetus. And famously, after Vietnam, Stockdale is asked how he gets through it by the author, Jim Collins. He says, you know, I had to accept where I was unflinchingly.

29:02He had to accept the difficulty and the pain and the struggle of that situation. But he says, I told myself that if I were to survive, and he believed that he would, he said, I would turn this into something that in retrospect, I would not trade. That is the essence of Epictetus's philosophy, that we don't choose our hardships. We don't choose what life has in store for us, but we choose how to respond to it. That we don't choose what we bear, but we choose how we bear it. Epictetus didn't choose to be a slave. Stockdale didn't choose to be a POW. You didn't choose to be born when and where you are to deal with what you are dealing with today, big and small.

29:41But you do choose whether you apply this philosophy in real life, right? Whether you choose to be made better for what you have experienced or not. And I think this is what Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius both share. Epictetus is made better for his ordeal. Marcus Aurelius is made better for the ordeal that he experiences being thrust into absolute power, which very few people make it out alive from. That is the power of Epictetus's influence. That is the legacy he leaves behind him.

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