It’s Good If It Makes You Good | Ask DS

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2:40It's good if it makes you good. Zeno lost everything in a shipwreck. His family business, his fortune, his taste for life at sea. You can read the whole story in Lives of the Stoics, but suffice to say, it ended not just a chapter of his life, but the very purpose to which he thought his life was for. Yet actually all was not lost. At a bookstore in Athens, Zeno discovered philosophy and would go on to found the school of Stoicism. Many years later, he would be asked about those days. I made a great fortune, he said, when I suffered a shipwreck. It was a different kind of fortune, but perhaps a better one, since it continues to this day, benefiting not just Zeno and his heirs, but all of us.

3:21And it may, in fact, be that Zeno was paraphrasing Zeno the cynic, one of the early philosophical influences on the Stoics in that quip. But Diogenes didn't suffer a shipwreck, but he had been exiled. And walking in Athens one day, he was mocked for his fate, but as always, insults found no target. But it was because of that, Diogenes said of his exile, calling his attacker a name in the process, that I turned to philosophy. Exile and shipwreck and bankruptcy, getting fired, being cheated on, blowing up your marriage, losing your license, going to jail, none of these things are good, and they are certainly not things we would choose.

3:58But for a Stoic, for a philosopher, they can be good if they make you good. It is not unfortunate if one finds a way to make something fortunate from them, finds a way to make a fortune out of them. And this is effectively the idea of The Obstacle is the Way, that everything is an opportunity to practice virtue, to be made better by what you went through, if you choose to do so. And I've got a great little reminder of this. The Obstacle is the White Coin, which you can grab at store.dailystoic.com.

4:40Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast. On these Thursday episodes, I try to answer some of your questions, or I try to answer questions from diverse groups of people. So we're going to flash forward actually this back in time, because it's going to go back to March of 22, where I did a virtual talk for some FBI agents. They were on this strength and leadership retreat. And I zoomed in, I gave a little talk, and then I answered a couple of questions. And again, it's always interesting to me to see different people and how they relate to stoicism, what they take out of it, what they're thinking about.

5:18And again, I think whether I'm talking to school teachers or FBI agents, elected leaders, or I'm talking to school kids, this is one of my absolute favorite things to do. So hopefully these questions will resonate with you. I thought it was an honor to talk to this group. Again, March 22 seems like absolutely forever ago. But here we are. I hope you enjoy this. And thanks so much to the FBI for having me out. and these are folks that are dealing with some heavy subjects, you know, child crimes and gangs and drugs, but what they do matters. And it's funny writing this justice book, you know, obviously we think of the justice system, but how does one comport oneself inside that justice system is really interesting to me too.

6:03So here is that Q &A and I'll get right into it.

6:15You talked about we can't control our outcomes, but we can control our reactions. As long as you talked about that for a couple of months. To me, that's the definition of stoicism, that we don't control what happens in the world, but we control how we respond to what happens in the world. Right. When I when I talk to sports teams, I say some version of this is like, look, the only thing you control is how you practice and how you play. Everything else is up to someone else. You don't control what the weather of game day is going to be. You don't control whether you start. You don't control whether the coach hates you.

6:46You don't control what the media is saying about you. You don't control if the refs suck, right? You don't control any of it. You control what you do on this play right now, right? You control what you do. So for the Stokes, the idea is like, look, I control my emotions. I control my thoughts. I control the actions that I'm going to take within the constraints of what's been, you know, sort of presented in front of me, like what the situation is. But that's it. And so having this more circumscribed notion of what's up to us and not up to us seems limiting, but it's actually really empowering. If you take for granted that most people spend an inordinate amount of time and energy focused on what other people are saying, what other people are thinking, right?

7:27Whose fault it is, right? What it means, right? What caused it? All of this is rejecting the limited agency in front of you, which is, you know, what am I going to do right now? What am I going to do about it. So to me, that's what stoicism is. It's this sort of zooming in on what's up to me. And that's where I'm going to focus all my energy and thoughts because everything else is wasted. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. As you were talking about stillness, I'm not a particularly religious person, but I go to church pretty much every week and I try to make that a priority for my family. And it occurred to me only recently that that's a space for me where my mind can contemplate things in a way that I don't do all week long.

8:08Yes. And really try to protect that time. And it never really occurred to me why that is until we were just talking. So that's very much that space for me. No, I love that. Right. It's a place where it's rude to be on your phone. Right. You're not talking. You're just listening. It's also, you know, depending on where you go to church, usually a building designed to sort of engender that, to create a sense of awe and wonder. I mean, imagine we Americans are so poor compared to the churches that the Europeans are able to go to. Imagine, you know, you're worshiping in some building that people have been worshiping in for a thousand years, right?

8:46Built in this sort of incomprehensible way. I think there's something to that. To take out the religious component, there's a church in Helsinki that I went to many years ago. It's just called the Church of Silence. And it's this building right in downtown Helsinki. And you walk into it and it's non-denominational. It looks like your ordinary chapel, but it's designed to be almost completely soundproof. There's no sound, there's no noise. And you just realize how loud the world is, right? How we're surrounded by literal and figurative noise all the time and how our ancestors would have been out in the forest or in a plane just surrounded by silence and how rare that silence is.

9:33And then I think we need to carve out blocks of that because that's where ideas pop into our head. That's where we get clarity. That's where we calm down. I think we need those experiences if we want to access all parts of our toolkit. So one of the other topics we're going to be discussing later today is typical conversations with people as leaders. Often we have to have tough challenging conversations when they're talking about someone's performance or maybe not on the ride. How would a scope approach that? What advice would you have from your study on those typical conversations? Well, one of the things I've been thinking about that lately is like, you know, you gotta, let's say you gotta let someone go, you have to give someone some unpleasant feedback, whatever it is.

10:17I try to remind myself that the only way to get good at that is by practice doing it. So as much as I would rather not be doing it, I just try to remind myself that it's practice, right? So I try to go into it going, okay, I've only fired three people in my life. This is the fourth one, right? So when I have to fire my 10th person 20 years from now, I'll be better for having gone through this. To me, that's kind of what the idea of the obstacle is the way is that these unpleasant, unchosen, undesirable situations are practice for harder things down the road, right? So if we can go into it not being like, oh, I can't believe I have to do this.

10:58This sucks. This is unfair. This isn't going to be fun. I try to go, okay, I need practice calling up, you know, maybe for me, it's my publisher. I have to call and have a frank conversation with my publisher about, you know, something that's not going well. You know, I could shy away from that. I could see if someone else could do it for me. I could pretend I don't need to do it and just see if it magically resolves itself. Or I can go, okay, tomorrow I'm picking up the phone and I'm going to do it and I'm going to be better for having done it. That's kind of how I think about those things. So you got to do it today, Ryan.

11:37You can't wait till tomorrow. No, that's a good point. But you get what I'm saying. And then I think the other thing is, and we don't have, I think this is something we've, it's been a little bit lost in some of our discussions about, you know, political correctness or whatever. It's like, you don't have to be a jerk, right? Like empathy is important and understanding that it's not pleasant for that other person, right? And thinking about how it feels for them and just going, okay, there's two human beings who are having to get through an unpleasant thing. I'm going to be as kind and respectful and calm as possible.

12:10I'm going to get through it. And then I'm going to move on. Like, I think so often that that idea of radical candor is just people trying to rationalize being a jerk, which I don't think makes anyone or anything better. So Ryan, you talked about the importance of personal hobbies. Yeah. And to reflect, I think, at least for me, the work-life imbalance creeps up on you. Sure. Any thoughts on recognizing the signs that we're not taking the time to reflect and how to make sure we do carve that time out? Yeah, I think those hobbies can kind of be a good canary in the coal mine that you're getting imbalanced.

12:47Like, let's say it's, you know, maybe your activities are physical or maybe you like working in your workshop or you like doing X, Y, or Z, when you haven't been able to do those things because you literally haven't had the time, your work-life balance is probably a bit skewed. Obviously, all of us at different phases in our careers, different jobs, different things, the amount of time or whatever is going to be different, but maybe coming up with some non-negotiables like, hey, once a week, I need to be able to do X or three times a week, I need to be able to do Y. if I'm sacrificing those things, not doing those things, it's because I've become in balance.

13:24And that might seem like I'm being respectful to my career. But in fact, if I want to do this thing for a long time, I have to be able to be almost more disciplined about my discipline. You know, we think about great athletes, we have this vision that they just work all the time, you know, it's Kobe Bryant waking up at four in the morning, or, you know, Tiger Woods hitting however many practice shots, whatever that is. But in truth, the number one cause of injury, the number one career ender for professional athletes is overtraining, right? They get burned out or they push themselves too far and they hurt themselves in a way in which they can't come back.

14:06And so realizing like, hey, I don't just want to be good at this this week, but I want to be good at this 15, 20, 30 years from now, it requires pacing yourself and having some self control in that sense.

14:22Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it, and this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.