It's Time To Get Clean | Kentucky Wildcats Basketball

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0:54I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods. and we get all our groceries for the week. Then we have dinner. It's one of their favorite things to do. It's one of my favorite things to do. And then my wife loves it because she doesn't have to take care of it. This holiday season, whether you're a guest or hosting the big dinner Whole Foods Market has what you need to delight everyone at your table. They even have heat and eat sides from the prepared foods department. You can make Whole Foods your one-stop shop. Everything follows Whole Foods Market's strict ingredients standards so you know it'll be delicious and good for you.

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1:49Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

2:25It's time to get clean. Life is a dirty, dusty affair. It was that way in Rome, and it's that way today. The puddle in the street splashes us. Someone else's nasty mood sullies our demeanor. The heat makes us sweat. The news of the world makes us worry. We spill some food. We spill out some frustration. We wake up in the morning fresh and ready to go, and by the end of the day, we are covered in dust, the dust of emotions, of work, of stress, of everything. Perhaps this year has been that way for you, beginning the new year with the best of intentions and then only to find the dust and dirt of life clinging to your thoughts, your moods, and emotions weighing you down.

3:05Think about the ways this manifests in our physical lives. We clean the house and then it gets dirty again. We take a load of stuff to charity, marvel at how much room there is in our closet or our garage, but soon enough it's full. We're accumulating, accumulating, accumulating. It's baggage, physical and emotion in our minds, in our houses, in our soul, and in our schedules. And that's what's lovely about the idea of spring cleaning. We're only a few months into the year, and already we know we could use a reset, that we could wipe the slate clean of grime and detritus and start again. That's actually one of the themes in the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge, by the way, this metaphor of cleaning.

3:49And it starts on Tuesday. I'd love for you to join us, dailystoic.com slash spring. It's around this question of how do we clean out our literal closets, but also our figurative ones. We have a great day on getting rid of the secrets that make us sick. How do we get clean, not only from the dust of earthly life as the Romans did at the baths, but also get clean from bad habits and compulsions? The question, as always, from the Stoics is how much longer are you going to wait to do this? How much longer are you going to let this stuff accumulate? How big are you going to let the pile get? How many more excuses are you going to make?

4:25And the fact that it's not technically spring where you live is not an excuse either. That's the whole purpose behind what we're doing with the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. It's designed to prompt that ritual cleaning as the seasons turn. That's why it's starting on March 19th, the first day of spring, at least in the Western Hemisphere. It's to give you clear and immediate strategies to maintain that sense of clarity and purpose for the whole year, all inspired by the Stoics. So you got to remember how long you've been putting this off, Mark Surrealis says. Remember how many extensions the gods have given you and the fact that you didn't use them.

5:02There's a limit to the time assigned to you, he said, and if you don't use it to free yourself, to wash yourself clean, it will be gone and never return. You could have the good life, the one you deserve right now, he says. So what are you waiting for? I would love to have you join us in the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. I'm recording this just wrapping up a spring break trip with my kids where I tried to wipe the slate clean, tried to think about what I want to do going into this new season. It's going to be crazy for me because I got the book launch and a bunch of other stuff. So I'm thinking about all the stuff that we built the challenge around, and I would love to have you join us.

5:35You could sign up right now at dailystoic.com slash spring. I'll link to it in the show notes. And then remember, if you're thinking about joining Daily Stoic Life, which has a bunch of awesome benefits, you'll get this challenge and all the other challenges for free. So I will see you there, dailystoic.com slash spring.

5:55Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I had a cool experience a couple weeks ago. I told you the thing that happened on the way there, which is I hurt myself. But I white knuckled it, got on the plane. I flew to Kentucky. So after I talked to the football team, I went and talked to the basketball team. Since it's March Madness, I thought I'd bring you that episode. I talked to the football team in this cool and the athletic center there. And then I went over to Jeff Ruby's Steakhouse, where Coach Cal had booked a room for the basketball team. And it's a hard slot talking to any sports team, but it's definitely harder when you are coming between them and their dinner, which I was.

6:39So I had to get in and get out. And I sort of ripped up my talk and very quickly gave a briefing on the four virtues. I was supposed to do these slides and this whole thing. And I just said, you know what? That's going to be too formal. I'm not going to keep their attention. They're not going to be interested. I'm just going to riff. I'm just going to riff on the four virtues. And I scribbled it down. And this is the talk that I I gave. It's what I'm thinking about a lot these days because I'm obviously about halfway, a little past halfway done on this Virtue series. The Justice book is coming out soon.

7:12You can grab that at dailystoic.com slash justice. But the Wisdom book is now underway. I'm writing that. So I wanted to riff really quickly on how the four virtues could apply to something like basketball at the elite level. These being some of the best basketball players in college basketball, many of them on the verge of turning pro. I just wanted to give them some guidance that they could take with them as they played. And then also I wanted to get out of their way so they could eat dinner. Bringing you that episode now, enjoy. And I'll bring you the Q and A in a Thursday episode coming up here real shortly.

7:44And thanks to coach cow for bringing me out and the craft family who set it all up. Jane, my old podcast producer and assistant made this happen. And I think you're really going to like the episode.

8:12It's good to be here with all of you. I'll try not to step on your dinner too much. I was going to do some slides and stuff. I think it'd be better if we just talk for a couple of minutes and then we can answer questions or talk about whatever you want. But Coach, you're right. The Stoics would say, and the Stoics were on all ends of the spectrum. We have Epictetus, who's a slave. that Marcus Suellus was the emperor of Rome. So you have powerlessness and you have extreme power. You have adversity and extreme success. And the Stoics would say that the greatest empire was command of oneself. No one is fit to rule who is not first master of themselves.

8:50So that's what Stoicism was. It was philosophy of self-discipline, self-mastery, so that you can do whatever it is that you do better. We tend to think of philosophy or philosophers as abstract and theoretical. Maybe it's cool in a class, we've got a great professor about it, but how does this help me in what I do? Well, the idea is to be in charge of yourself, in command of yourself, to get the most out of yourself. That's what stoicism is actually there for. And stoicism is built around four virtues. Those four virtues create what they would call erite, or excellence. And the virtues are pretty simple, and some of them might sound familiar to you, because these cardinal virtues, as they're known in Western civilization, are also the cardinal virtues of Christianity.

9:38The virtues are courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. And the idea for the Stoics is that everything we experience in life, big situations, little situations, moments of peak performance, and then also moments of difficulty or adversity, What they are is an opportunity to practice excellence, to practice one or more likely all four of these virtues and some four or another. So that's what stoicism is. It's not this theoretical thing. It's an operating system. It's a guide to living that people have been using now for thousands of years. Again, whether they're emperors or soldiers, statesmen, and even athletes.

10:22That would have been called the Olympic Games 20-odd centuries ago. These people are practicing these ideas. Gladiators are practicing them before they go literally into the arena. So I thought I would just maybe rip on these four virtues a little bit, and then you can ask me whatever questions you want. And I think you'll see how they connect to sports, but if you have questions, you can shout out or interrupt at any time. But basically that first virtue, it seems obvious, right? Courage. We know what courage is. There's no society, no culture that worships the opposite of courage, right? Cowardice is a mortal sin.

10:57But courage isn't just physical, right? It's not just going out against someone who's physically bigger than you. It's not just rushing into a burning building or into the line of fire. Courage is the decision to put yourself out there. Courage is the decision to take a risk, to say something that might be unpopular, right? To go for it, right? To try, right? The scariest thing in the world, especially when you're young, is to put it all out there because if you don't succeed, you fail, you feel like it says something about you, right? My mentor is this guy named Robert Greene. He wrote this amazing book called The 48 Laws of Power.

11:40We talked about how when we were young, we had this kind of paradoxical attitude where we really want things, but we're also kind of maybe we half-ass it a little bit. We're rebellious, but we're also lackadaisical, he says, because we're worried that if we put everything into what we're doing, it doesn't work out. What does that say? Right. We don't want to feel the pain of being earnest and trying. So I want to expand the definition of courage, not just the ability to stare down danger, but to also put yourself in situations that are scary, that are challenging, that make you vulnerable. There's a story about young Jimmy Carter before he became president.

12:22He was a young student at the U.S. Naval Academy. And his dream, he wants to be an officer on nuclear submarines. So he's being interviewed by this guy named Admiral Rickover. He's the head of the nuclear submarine program in the U.S. Navy. So he's going back and forth, interviewing him for a job or maybe like a recruiting mission. How did you do in your class, right? Jimmy Carter proudly tells him where he stands in his class at the Naval Academy. He's asking about his grades. He's asking about all this stuff. Then finally Rickover looks at him and he says, but did you always do your best? and Carter asks to think about it he wants to say yeah of course I did my best I got good grades I did well in my class but he thinks about it and he decides to be honest he goes no you know what I didn't always do my best he was thinking about times could have done more studying could have tried a little bit harder in PT could have asked more questions right could have put himself up to things he says no I didn't always do my best and Rick over looks at him, like the big table like this, and he goes, why not?

13:29And he gets up and he leaves the room. Courage, that decision to do your best, to try to put yourself out there and take those risks, that's one of the things that the Stoics mean by courage. They don't just mean, you know, distinguishing yourself on the field of battle and the floor of the Coliseum, which of course the Stoics also do. So no, this is the next discipline or the next virtue, which would be this idea of discipline. Now, of course, I don't need to talk to you guys about physical discipline. You guys are in incredible shape. You've worked harder than basically anyone in the world to get where you are.

14:00So maybe we need to, again, like courage, go there's a physical component. There's also the emotional, the mental component of discipline. Discipline is not just trying hard, working hard. Stoics do this. They say we treat the body rigorously so that it's not disobedient to the mind. You're getting in that cold plunge. You don't want to, but you force yourself to anyway. It's up early. You don't want to get up. nicer under the covers, as Mark Shrewis says in meditations, but you go, I wasn't put here to feel nice and sleep under the covers. I was put here to do something. We get up and we do it, right?

14:33You think you got nothing in the tank and you draw on something where you push it up. That's, of course, discipline. So Stokes would also talk about emotional discipline, mental discipline, like we said, being a master of oneself, controlling one's emotion. You wouldn't be here if you weren't deeply passionate about the game basketball. off. 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 in Austin and bought a truck.

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16:29Can you control that passion in heated moments? In moments where so much is on the line. Where you've just been treated unfairly. You've just gotten screwed over. You just got a bad call. Discipline isn't just I push myself harder than anyone. Discipline is I am in command and control of myself. One of the expressions from the Silics is to look at everything in the calm, light, mild philosophy. The idea of being calm and cool under pressure, that's discipline too. It's not just the strongest guy, but it's the guy who can't be rattled, who shit talking doesn't get in his head, who doesn't respond to insults or provocations, who doesn't get rattled by the fans or booing or the critics on Twitter or whatever it is.

17:19The person who is in command of themselves, that's the kind of discipline that we're talking about that we have to call them. You can imagine, Mark Stimulus is the emperor of Rome. There would have been millions of people who didn't like him, who booed him, who jeered him, and he had to figure out a way to tune out what he needed to tune out and focus on what he needed to focus. And so we cultivate this discipline, right? We're in command of ourselves. It's not that the Stoics were emotionless, but they did try to be less emotional, right? They tried to be the even keel. The metaphor Mark Sreos uses in meditation says to be like the rock, the plane crash over and eventually the sea falls still around.

17:59That's what you want to be, right? You want everything to settle. That's what you do on the free throw line. You take a breath. You let everything settle down. It's what you do in a timeout. And there's 20 seconds left. And you're calming down. You're getting to a place of what's called ataraxia, or freedom of disturbances. This is what great athletes, great coaches do. Even though they are rah-rah, they're excited, they're into it, they have to command themselves. Karim Abdul-Jabbar was once asked to describe John Woodman in one word. What word do you think he used? It's not passion. You'd think it'd be passionate.

18:30No, he said dispassionate, meaning he wasn't ruled by his passion. Of course, he cares about winning. Of course, he cares about the game. Of course, he cares about so many things in life. But when it came to standing on the sideline and doing the thing that he needed to do, he understood that that even keel being in command of himself was the important thing, right? That's what we're talking about when we talk about the discipline. discipline. And the next one would be justice. Justice isn't just what happens in the law courts. It's not just what happens when you get arrested or when you have to hire a lawyer.

19:07It says something I think about our society that when we hear that word justice, unfortunately, that's what we think about. We think about whether something is legal or not, whether something's allowed or not. Of course, actually, justice is not a noun. It's a verb. Justice is something we do. It's how we live. It's the standards we hold ourselves to. It's the actions we take day to day. I don't know, a decision like whether to show up on time or be late, that doesn't seem like a matter of justice, but it is because when you're late, you're making other people wait for you, and you're saying, my time's more important than your time, and I don't really care about you.

19:47I I don't care about the consequences that my decision has on other people. Or the decision to make a commitment. You tell someone you're going to do something. Can they take that to the bank or not? Literally or figuratively, right? Are you a man or a woman of your word? These are the kinds of things the Stokes are talking about when they talk about justice. Of course, they're also politicians. They also are lawyers. They are involved in the bigger picture stuff. But justice is who we are. the standards we hold ourselves to, the sort of North Star that we have, the integrity that we live with or don't.

20:23And of course, there are plenty of people who don't have good moral compasses, who don't do what they're supposed to, or only limit themselves to whether something is legal or not, allowed or not, whether they can get away with it or not. But the Stokes would say, this person isn't really getting away with anything, because in the end, they suffer. that's the kind of person they are. And so for the Stoics, it was about the decision to be a person of rectitude, a man or woman of honor, of integrity. And then when you have that, when you have a sense of right and wrong, fairness matters to you, decency matters to you, kindness matters to you, that encourages you to look out at the world around you and see where can I make a difference, where can I make positive contributions, how can I use the platform that I have?

21:14And all of you now have platforms. How can I use that platform responsibly to help other people, to lift other people up, right? How can I pay forward all the things that were done to me, right? All the people that gave me breaks, that opened doors for me, right? How can I pay that forward? That's what the virtue of justice is about. So the final virtue is the one I think is the one we have to commit to the most over the course of our lives, which is the virtue of wisdom, right? The pursuit of knowledge, of truth, study and understanding. All of you are student athletes, right? But the emphasis should be on the first part in the sense that your students, not just literally in a university for however long you're here, but you're also students of athletics, you're students of the game, right?

22:02You're studying what you do. However long you do this for, the decision to commit to being a student is the most important decision you can make. Socrates in the ancient world is considered the wisest man on earth. Why is he considered wise? It's because he knows what he doesn't know, right? He's aware of his own ignorance. That's the idea, right? And this, starting from a place of humility rather than from a place of ego, that's what we're talking about, right? The idea to focus on where you can get better, not on how great you already are. Epictetus has this great quote. It says, remember, it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know.

22:45So if you think you're the greatest basketball player on earth, you are the greatest basketball player that you are capable of being on this earth. But if you know you can get better and you focus on all the things you know you can do better, that is also self-executing. That is also self-fulfilling. This is why scientists, why philosophers, they focus on all the questions they have, all the things that they don't know about that they want to get better at. And this is why we read. We read because reading opens us up to worlds and experiences that we can benefit from. It's a great line about how any fool can learn by experience.

23:27I prefer to learn by the experiences of others. I prefer to learn, but I don't know from other people.

24:00or if you join Daily Stoic Life, you'll get this challenge and all our challenges for free. I'll see you there.

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