Just Get It Done | Ask DS

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0:55I'm recording this on a Monday and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey because they've got a bunch of great options. Turkeys start at$1.49 a pound if you have Prime with organic birds at$2.99 a pound. And they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys that will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends.

1:32Everything they sell has high standards to help you shop with confidence. Enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market. Welcome 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 who are 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.

2:09Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

2:24Just get it done. No job is perfect. No situation is ideal. Not everyone is going to like you. Not everyone is going to appreciate your perspective or your beliefs. By the same token, you're not going to agree with everyone else in your industry, in your company, in your moment in time. But this doesn't exempt you from doing your best from trying to act with virtue. This was the takeaway from H.R. McMaster, a student of stoicism, after he served as the national security advisor to President Donald Trump. You can check out the interview we have with General McMaster back on the Daily Stoic podcast.

2:58I think it was last year or the year before. In his new book, At War With Ourselves, My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, he writes not only of the challenges he faced in that pressure cooker of a job, but he also speaks quite a bit of the necessity of leaders being familiar with the ideas of Seneca and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. The dilemmas of that job that he held from 2017 to 2018 would not have been unfamiliar to the Stoics. In Lives of the Stoics, we tell the story of Arius Didymus and Athenodorus, both advisors to Augustus, Rome's first emperor. Seneca served for eight years under Nero.

3:33How do you direct your boss in the right direction? How do you deal with criticism and feedback from outsiders who don't have the whole picture? How do you avoid palace intrigue? How do you make the best of impossible situations? The Stoics knew these dilemmas all too well. In meditations, Marcus Aurelius reminds himself not to go through life expecting Plato's Republic. Because the struggle for public opinion, for progress, for justice, it is rarely straightforward and is almost never clean. Self-righteousness only makes the fight harder. You must learn how to actually get things done, how to navigate the messy, complicated world of power and influence.

4:09If the cucumber is bitter, throw it out, Marcus writes. If there are brambles in the path, go around. He's telling us that as a leader, a politician, we must be pragmatic and realistic. They must work with the situations they face, making the best of what's in front of us. Most of us will not experience the intense scrutiny faced by McMaster or Marcus or Athena Doris or Seneca. But we would all do well to take these words to heart, to focus on what matters most, doing the best we can, of comporting ourselves with virtue, even if virtue is something in rare supply where we happen to be.

4:57Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. I imagine you don't listen to much Irish radio. I don't, not as much as I used to anyway. No, no. I was on this radio show in Ireland last week. Sean Moncrief is an Irish broadcaster and journalist. He's got a great podcast. He has this weekend afternoon radio show called Moncrief on News Talk, and he's a columnist for the Irish Times. I'm going out to Ireland in two weeks doing those talks Dublin, London, Rotterdam, and then I'm flying back to Vancouver and Toronto. If you want to come see me, there's still a few tickets left, ryanholiday.net slash tour.

5:39But anyways, he asked me a bunch of questions about stoicism, and I thought I'd play it for you. It's a little different vibe than our normal Q &As we've been running, and I thought I'd throw it at you. Anyways, I hope to see you at the Dublin Convention Center on November 15th, London at the Troxy on the 12th, Rotterdam at the Ahoy on the 13th, the Center for Performing Arts in Vancouver, and then the Elgin Theatre in Toronto on the 20th. Here's me explaining some stoicism for you and what I've been thinking about lately. Enjoy. Ryan Holiday is a bestselling author and hugely popular podcast, but perhaps unusually for someone in that line of work, a lot of what he talks about is a philosophy that's about two and a half thousand years old.

6:28Ryan is a Stoic and will be in the Dublin Convention Centre on November the 15th. Afternoon, Ryan. Hi, thanks for having me. So could you define what you mean by Stoicism? Stoicism is an ancient philosophy that comes to us from Greece and Rome, but it's really this idea that we have to focus on what we control. We don't control other people, we don't control the world around us, but we control how we respond. And basically, Stoicism says we should respond with virtue. And by virtue, people would have different definitions of what virtue means. Sure. Yeah, the Stoic virtues should be familiar to you guys in Ireland.

7:07Courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. These are the cardinal virtues. Stoicism and Christianity both share them. But it's this idea that, again, we control what we do. We control our thoughts, our opinions, our actions. We don't control whether people appreciate them, whether they understand them, whether they agree with them. But we control who we are in the world. And that's what we should be focused on. So are you saying it's like you can't really, or only to the most limited extent, can you control events around yourself? The only thing you can really control is your reaction to those events.

7:45Yeah, we control mostly how we interpret and view these events. There's a line from Epictetus, one of the great Stoic philosophers. He says, you know, it's not things that upset us. It's our opinion about things. So what somebody says, that's on, that's objective, right? We say, oh, that's rude. Oh, that damaged my reputation. Oh, that's offensive. And so really, Stoicism is trying to kind of step out, be as objective as possible. You know, people obviously think in English that Stoic means, you know, has no emotions. I wouldn't say that the Stoics were emotionless, but they did try to be less emotional because oftentimes our emotions are about our interpretation of things as opposed to what they actually are.

8:33That would seem to imply that Stoicism means taking a step back from the world, being less invested in it? I think the Stoics do try to take a step back, but not from the world. So actually what I would say is if you are to be engaged in the world, if you're going to enter politics, if you're going to be a parent, if you're going to try to run a business, what you need is that ability to step back so you can see things as they are so that then you can take a step forward and be engaged, be active, but not be at the mercy of, you know, our initial impressions, be at the mercy of, you know, high emotions.

9:11What you want to be is calm. You want to be as focused. And this allows you to be more effective. Yeah. If you have a child and the child breaks its leg, does that mean you have to step back from that in an emotional sense, not show you're upset by that? Therefore, your partner, the child's mother saying, you're just standing there looking at the child. OK, you've got the ambulance and you've sorted all that out, but you don't seem to care. No, I don't think that at all. Look, the Stoics had children. The Stoics loved their children. I have children. I love my children. But I think you raise a good point.

9:47Look, your child falls and breaks their leg. You can freak out. You can get very upset. You can try to what happened? Why did this happen? What were you thinking? Or as you said, you can call the ambulance and you can comfort them and you can take care of them. And then, you know, when you get home, you can focus on how do we make sure this doesn't happen again. So, so in any given situation, there's a number of things you can do that make it better. Very rarely, I would say, does getting upset have anything to do with that? I think we, we often indulge our emotions, our opinions about these things, and we tell ourselves we're making it better, but it doesn't look, I'll give you a great example.

10:27Travel is this for me. I tend to be anxious. I'm going to be flying to Dublin in November. Me sitting there pacing nervously. Is the is the plane going to be delayed? They said it was only going to be 10 more minutes. When are we going to board? None of this has any impact over when and how the plane ultimately takes off. I have to accept and there is a big part of stoicism that's about acceptance. I have to accept that I am a passenger on this ride as we all are in life. And so it's not passive in the face of the situations we do have some say and influence over. But when we don't, it is stepping back and allowing things to happen.

11:05Yes. Though at the same time, we are emotional creatures. We have an emotional life. So is stoicism the eradication of those emotions? Back to my example of the child with the broken leg, once you've got the ambulance, once they're plastered up, once you've got them home and they're asleep, Maybe then you can burst into tears or drink half a bottle of brandy, but there might be, there would probably be, if you're emotionally invested in the child at all, you will need to release that emotion at some point, would you not? Well, I don't know about drinking the half a bottle of brandy, what that's doing for anyone's emotions.

11:41Don't be judgy here, Ryan. Don't be judgy. I get your point. Seneca, one of the great Stoics, he says, you know, no amount of philosophy is going to take away natural feeling. Of course, we're going to have emotions, we're going to have reactions, and stuffing them down, pretending they don't exist, that's not helpful to anyone. But, you know, Seneca writes a number of very moving essays on grief, about processing, you know, the love that we feel for someone who is gone. But, you know, if three years later you still can't get out of bed because, you know, you're mourning someone, that's probably taking it too far.

12:15So stoicism to me is about the processing of those emotions, understanding them, but not letting them necessarily rule and dominate our decisions and our actions. I would make a distinction, for instance, between feeling anger and doing something out of anger. And so to me, stoicism is that is is the transition from I am feeling this. I am feeling this because of and that's why I am going to punch this person in the face. Yeah, well, so, yeah, well, then under Stoicism is it could one achieve a perfectly rational process and go, here's why I'm going to punch this person in the face. I'm completely in control of my emotions.

12:58And it's the most logical thing to do. Well, look, the Stoic virtue of justice, I think the justice system, someone commits a crime, someone does something heinous and hurtful. There is a time after, you know, those extreme emotions have passed where we don't feel it as strongly. And yet we still understand that in a civil society, in a world of laws, a person has to be accountable for their actions. So I think stoicism is the idea of not doing the thing in the moment as you are consumed with anger. Rage Seneca writes another very fascinating essay on anger, and it's mostly aimed at leaders. And he's saying, for no one, is it more important to get control of your temper than in a person who is in a position of responsibility because someone other than you bears the consequences of, you know, that that losing of one's temper.

13:55And we see many leaders around the world, some of them perhaps in your country, who would be more victim to their base passions, let's say. I don't know who you could possibly be talking about. Yeah. That might be a worry to a Stoic. Well, yeah, look, the Stoics would say that Donald Trump is temperamentally unfit in every imaginable way to hold the highest office. And the Stoics advised emperors. They advised generals. They they are in the thick of political life for several hundred years in Greece and Rome. And the idea that the Stoics say that the greatest empire is command of oneself. Seneca says no one is fit to rule who is not first master of themselves.

14:39And in that way, Donald Trump is is eminently unqualified to be president. And again, almost every imaginable way, because as Hillary Clinton said in that first debate, someone you can bait with a tweet should not have their finger on the button of the most powerful nuclear arsenal in the world. Yeah, he did offer you a job, though. He did. Not him personally, but I was offered a spot in the administration, which, you know, again, I think is an interesting stoic dilemma. the stoics felt like one should be engaged in politics and they did serve and work in imperfect regimes to say the least seneca is in nero's administration and and even in modern times a general james mattis who was a four-star general in the marines and then secretary of defense under trump uh you know has carried marcus aurelius's meditations one of the stoic philosophers with him on 40 years of deployments uh general hr mcmaster who is trump's national security advisor, talks a bunch about stoicism and how it helped him during his time as national security advisor.

15:52It just it wasn't the right fit for me for a number of ethical and personal reasons. But well, actually, the list of people who work for Donald Trump and then realize it was a bad idea and we could exhaust the rest of our time together talking about that. Sure, it did not end well for anyone. But it is an interesting, because as you say, a Stoic would say, no, you should be involved in politics, even if it's, and it's never going to be perfect, whatever those circumstances are. But is it always up to the individual then, if they're working within civil society, if they're hoping to make some sort of positive contribution, to decide when I've reached the point where that's not happening now?

16:35Yeah, this is a dilemma, not just in Stoicism. Confucius is an advisor to a number of princes and kings in ancient China. And he talks about, you know, which ones do you serve and which ones do you don't? It's a tricky thing. And I certainly am much more sympathetic to military officers who there is a long tradition and culture around sort of serving any administration in a nonpartisan way. For me, I just I just found the entire concept to be unconscionable. And I felt like my study of history made it quite clear to me where where that was inevitably going to end up. And then also, you know, I do think there was a fatalism to the to the Stoics.

17:21You know, Marcus Aurelius becomes emperor and it's not a job he sought or wanted. And I always thought it interesting that it never seems to occur to him that he didn't have to do it. And so I think we each have one life and we have to decide how we're going to spend it. Yeah. Could that be where in the era we live in now, we probably have more agency and a more subjective morality almost than they would have had two and a half thousand years ago. Those Stoics believed in a natural order and therefore they had a template to apply things to, which not everybody does have that belief in a natural order.

18:03In a way that made things simpler. And we should be sympathetic to the fact that here today we are just faced with simply more choices as a result of the progress we've made as a society. I'll give you a really great example. Epictetus, who's, as I said, one of the great Stoic philosophers, is born a slave and he spends the first 30 years of his life in slavery. And stoicism obviously helps him in this. How do you deal with the fact that grave injustice has been done on you and you you can't control it? You can't do anything about it. But but it is interesting. Nowhere in his writings does he ever seem to question the legitimacy of the institution itself.

18:44Right. He's he's oriented towards how do I survive it? How do I endure it? How do I not let it break me? And then when he eventually does find his freedom, there doesn't seem to be anything in his writings about imagining a world or an ordering of society, which does not subject the lowest among us to, you know, backbreaking, soul crushing slavery. And I do think that's because in the ancient world, hierarchy and caste were so ossified and taken for granted that it was inconceivable that someone would get to choose what profession they had or where they lived or what their station in society is.

19:22And it's wonderful that we have that. It's just that we should we should also understand that that faces each of us with an exhausting and sometimes overwhelming amount of choices. Yeah.

19:37Hey, 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.

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