It’s Better Than A Grave And A Hearse | Ask Daily Stoic

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2:14Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics. We're trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

2:57It's better than a grave and a hearse. It may have been a couple hard weeks. It may have been a couple hard years. It may have been a tough decade, like the one that Marcus Aurelius had, which we've talked about before, complete with plagues and floods and betrayals and health issues and more. It may have been a hard life, like Epictetus'. You know what? At least you woke up above ground this morning. You're alive. Not everyone is so lucky. In fact, it may have seemed like you yourself may not have been so lucky. So here you are, alive, for now anyway. What are you going to do with it? What are you going to make of it?

3:33Think of all the people who would kill to be in your position. Think of all the people who have been killed and are thus not in your position. Think of all the dark days where, again, you were not so sure you would ever get to this position. Let that put everything in perspective. Let that give you some priority and urgency. Use this gift wisely.

4:18It felt for a second like I was a musician, which I'm not, or a comedian, which I am not. But I had a little taste of the sort of road warrior life. And it's funny, one of those talks that I ended up giving was to the folks at Live Nation who do the vast majority of concerts and events in this country. I think they did the two talks I gave with Robert Greene at theaters late last year. And I'm not sure if they're doing the two talks. I'm doing a talk, two talks in Australia, one in Sydney, one in Melbourne. the last day of July and the first day of August. You can grab tickets for those, by the way, at ryanholiday.net slash Australia.

4:55The point is, I got a taste of a slightly different life, one very different than the life of a philosopher-author, which is usually at home sitting at your desk. And it's not exactly the life I want, but it's always interesting to see a different perspective. And then at the end of the talk, I answered a bunch of questions. There were some lovely folks, And we talked about how you protect your time, something I need to be better at, how you balance being ambitious with the sort of stoic idea of focusing on what you're in control. We talked about mentors and teamwork and how to maintain those kinds of relationships.

5:29I thought it was a lovely talk. I'll bring you the whole talk at some point. But in the meantime, here's me answering some questions about stoicism from the folks at Live Nation. I've got a couple different parts of this I'll bring you. But for now, here's the first couple questions. And I hope you like it. Okay, let's kick it off with the Q &A. Ryan, your recall is much better than mine. But I have this apetite quote in my head. And it's something about, you know, good things take time. Grapes and figs take time to culminate. But in this industry that we're in, time is often dictated by, you know, deadlines.

6:11and just our chaotic nature of our business. So, you know, how do we get that calendar? How do we cultivate that time? You know, that's something that, that's the gold star. But when other people are putting these demands on us, like how do we, how do we get there? Yeah, that's something that sort of keeps me up at night. I've come to believe sort of everything in life is a lagging indicator, right? So like, if you're, if you like what you look like in the mirror, that's because you were eating well six months ago or working out six months ago. When I'm sitting down and the writing is going well, that's because I was researching and thinking and coming up with ideas a long time ago.

6:48When an artist gets up on stage and there's fans, that's a result of marketing and investments and connections that they've built over time. And so that's all from the past and you're going to want it in the future. So you can't just be sort of cultivating and reaping what you have, but you also have to be like sowing the next generation, the next. So I think about that a lot. As you get busier and busier, it's hard to make time to generate the things that ultimately, you know, you're going to want to rely on in the future. And so it's kind of, it's a battle for me. It's like, hey, I'm saying yes to these cool things.

7:24I'm doing this cool stuff. I'm also tired or whatever. Am I reading and thinking and coming up with what the next stuff is? So it does, it requires a lot of discipline. And I think it requires a certain amount of confidence. The thing about ego is like ego wants to be everywhere all at once. Ego doesn't want to say no because you think, you know, you think you're never going to get that request again. Right. And you're not it's you have to be alone or I could be this thing where I'm going to be the center of attention. Right. You know, there's kind of it's funny how how ego thinks like everything's even revolving around you.

8:00You don't want to say no as if the party's not going to be good without you. And it's like, nobody cares. And so I think it requires some discipline and confidence and sort of peace in yourself to say, hey, to do what I'm trying to do, I have to be willing to not do these things. And to pay the price of not doing those things. So that when I sit down to write six months from now, I'm not like, shit, I don't have any ideas. So I'm not so burned out that I can't think. And so I think that's the battle we're all in in some way. I do this whole thing with like future Morgan, my future self. Like Marcus Aurelius having that internal conversation.

8:42It's like future Morgan's going to be really excited that you did the athletic green or whatever it is in the morning. So that helps me benefit later on. Yeah, someone told me like obviously time travel is not real. But there is something about how you can make decisions now that your future self will be like so grateful for. And you can be making things that your future self doesn't even know you're going to need, but it turns out you will need. Every once in a while I have this moment where I'll be looking for something, and I'll need something for a book or a project I'm doing, and I'll go, wait, I think there's something.

9:15And I'll go back to a book I read 10 years ago, and I'll find I wrote exactly what I needed, or I made this note that I'm now drawing on all these years later. I didn't know that future me would need that, but I was investing and, you know, sort of storing stuff that the future me was going to rely on. And so when we say, like, all things are a lagging indicator, that's what we mean. Yeah. Definitely want to get to some crowd questions. I know they're coming around with the mics, but can you put your guys' hands up for a question? Daniel, you're the first one I see right here. Perfect. Thank you for being here, Ryan.

9:51Of course. I'm a big fan. so my question is we are all very ambitious people we all love what we do how can we balance that ambitious drive for our professional success with the stoic principle of focusing only what's within our control yeah I mean obviously like as a writer I want the books to sell and they need to sell or they won't let me keep doing them right but I paradoxically have found that the more I am thinking about, how are people going to respond to this? How is it going to do? Where's it going to land on the bestseller list or whatever? All that is taking me away in the moment when I should be writing from what I need to be doing.

10:34So I have found that the longer I've done it and the better I've got at it, the less I care about, the less I think about the external results because I have my own standards or practices that when I focus on them completely, more often than not translate to those external results, right? So you become more process-oriented than outcome-oriented because the process is in your control, but the outcome is not. The famous line from the football coach Bill Walsh was, the score takes care of itself, right? practicing, by investing, by studying film, by training, by doing all the things that a good football team does at practice, in team meetings, in the film room, etc.

11:31That translates, again, more often than not on the field for the thing that you are trying to and ultimately judged on. So that's kind of how I think about it. And then that has the benefit of, look, when you knock it out of the park, you're not like, look how amazing I am, because you're just focused on what you're doing. And sometimes when you do everything right and it doesn't work out, or imagine an artist whose album's ahead of its time, or it comes out during the middle of a pandemic, or they can't promote it, or the middle of a writer's strike for a movie or whatever, and sometimes it doesn't work.

12:09You're also not devastated by it because you're focused on process, and that allows you to quickly bounce back and do it again. Next question. I think I saw Jenna's hand up. Hi. Thank you so much for being here. Of course. You talk a lot about, you know, the things that come from within you, and we all work on these really big teams with other people. So I'm curious if you can share your thoughts on the importance of mentorship and teamwork in your professional career and how that might be able to fit in with some of the principles you've discussed today. Yeah, I started as a research assistant for writer and that's how I learned how the business worked.

12:48That's how I learned how the craft worked. And so for many, many years, I was doing like the unpleasant grunt work, but I was learning the process from start to finish. And this opened up doors for me and created relationships for me. So I'm a product of that. And then, you know, I think one of the things you realize about mentorships is there's nothing you can ever do to pay that person back. All you can do is pay it forward to other people. And so, you know, how are you cultivating the next version of that with other people? but also realizing that you know mentorship isn't totally a selfless thing because you get ideas and energy and connections from that person just as uh they got it from you so i i think it's really important i think it's the best way to learn and i think it's really important that we're always sort of looking for people who are a little bit further along than us or a lot further like if If you, Seneca's thing about like, what's the sort of race that you're in or what's the path that you're on, who actually does have the same path as you is further along.

13:54And then what can you learn from them? So you're not necessarily doing everything by trial and error. I think that's the way that it should go. And do you have suggestions on like how to connect or keep in touch? You know, for a younger generation trying to like seek out a mentor, like they have that person, they're like, Robert Green, I'm idolized by you. I really want to dive in. How do you keep in touch with that person? How do you keep connecting with them over time? I was just talking to someone about this yesterday. We were laughing. It's like the number one thing is to not ask someone to be your mentor.

14:25That's not how it works. It's like, will you be my boyfriend? It's just not how it works. It evolves. It's something that ensues. And so what actually happened is I start, the first thing I did for Robert was transcribe interviews. This is before AI, obviously. And so, like, I had to just... This was what was 50 Cent or something? Yes, he was doing a book of 50 Cent. I transcribed dozens of hours of interviews between Robert and 50. And then I did a good job and he gave me another thing and I did another thing and another thing. In retrospect, it was an apprenticeship or, you know, in retrospect, he was my mentor.

15:07But in the moment, there's people that knew each other and there was an exchange of value, you know? And so I think it's really important that you see it as something that ensues. Obviously, you reach out and you ask questions and it doesn't just happen, but it also does kind of happen. And I think, you know, people who are demonstrating potential and are demonstrating that they take good advice and are going places, those are people who do not normally have a shortage of people who are giving them advice. Right. And so it's also a sort of a self propagating thing also.

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