Let Go To Get This | Ask DS

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1:43Welcome 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. Some 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.

2:23Let go to get this. Whenever Epictetus saw an anxious person, he always asked himself, what do they want? What are they after? For if a person wasn't wanting something outside of their own control, he said, why would they be stricken by anxiety? We all fall into this trap. What does the anxious father worried about his children want? For the world to be safe and grief to never find him. The frenzied traveler, what does she want? For no bad weather and for traffic to parts so she can catch her flight, and the nervous investor that the market won't dip and instead that every investment should pay off.

2:59Having goals and desires is fine, but needing things to go a certain way to be happy, getting worked up, getting excited, nervously pacing about things we can't control, lashing out at people we love, at strangers behind the service counter, all because everyone in the world isn't following the script we wrote in our head about how things should go? These pained, intense, anxious moments reveal the most futile and servile versions of ourselves. It's almost like we believe if we exchange our peace of mind for stress and worry, the whole world will reward us with what we want. This is why Epictetus's famous phrase is so important, that there's things that are up to us and things that are not up to us.

3:41The thing that's on the back of the anxiety medallion, the one I have my desk right here. The idea is that we need a reminder to identify what is in our control, what we can shape and influence in life, and most importantly, what we could not. A Stoic learns to let go of those things we can't control. A Stoic accepts things won't always turn out how we want. And when a Stoic does that, what we receive in return is moments of peace and quiet. If you can cut free of impressions that cling to the mind, Marcus Aurelius said, free of the future in the past, we can make ourselves, as Empedocles says, a sphere rejoicing in its perfect stillness.

4:19You could argue that Stoic philosophy is basically a set of tools designed to help us combat our stress and worries, to help us focus on what we control. And that's what we've been working on with this medallion. It's like a little advice. It's a fidget, if you know what that is. Rolling in my fingers now is recommending one to someone the other day who came to my office and was struggling with something, just like a little reminder that goes, hey, is worrying about this changing it? Is it making it better? Or is it making me feel worse? The idea is like, where are you putting that nervous energy, the one you have right before a big presentation or a big first date or an important test or when I'm getting up on stage before an audience?

4:57How can you calm yourself down? How can you remind yourself what part of this is up to me? What am I wanting here? Am I wanting the right thing or not? Anyways, that's what the medallion is there for. As Seneca says, he who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary. And as Mark's really said that, you know, the idea is that the anxiety is within you. The situation is not causing it. You are bringing it to the situation. Check it out. I'll link to it in today's show notes. I have one here on my desk. I think it's one of the coolest things we've ever done at Daily Stoic. And I think you'll like it.

5:36Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Back in March of 2003, I had a cool opportunity. I flew in, flew out, gave a talk in Cancun to a bunch of leaders at PepsiCo, actually PepsiCo Mexico. My kids were very excited because of all the delicious snacks that I got to take home, all these fascinating Mexican candies and crunchies and such. But for me, it was cool. Now, obviously, my Spanish is terrible, despite three, four years of Spanish in high school and then another one or two in college, I'm terrible. But the president of PepsiCo Mexico, Robert Martinez, did a wonderful job translating and grabbing the questions for me.

6:26It was a lovely place. I went for a quick run along the beach and then I flew home. So thanks to Pepsi for having me out. They were asking me like, how does ego create blind spots? My answer was, I mean, I'll tell you a blind spot that I do see having written the book. So the question I've gotten most from Ego is the End of the Year. Obviously, this will never be true here. But people go, my boss has a huge ego. What can I do? Right? It's never, I have a huge ego, what can I do? It's my boss has a huge ego, right? And this sort of goes to what we were joking about earlier, which is that we are really good at identifying the flaws of other people and putting them to the microscope and going, hey, they'd be so much more successful if they could just do this, this, or this.

7:18But then we don't seek out that feedback ourselves, right? There's a, sorry, again, my examples are very, very American, but there's a famous story about Pete Carroll, who's the coach of the Seattle Seahawks. Obviously, in sports, they watch a ton of film. They break down every single play. Here's what you could have done better. You know, even the quarterback, even the stars are subject to relentless play-by-play breakdowns on film. And one year at the end of the season, he did a film breakdown of all the coaches, and the coaches had to watch film of how they coached. And he was saying like, he's never seen the coaches more unhappy.

7:58And he watched how bad they were at taking feedback. The same feedback that they put the players to all the time. And so, I don't know if this totally answers your question, but I think because of ego, the big blind spot we have is to our own flaws, our own issues. And we spend a lot of time meddling in other people, giving other people advice, speculating about what they should do. and then we leave ourselves more or less as is. Where do we actually have the most impact? Where can we make the most improvements? It's in ourselves. Then someone asked me, how do you differentiate between self-confidence and ego?

8:38Yeah, I mean, look, one of the keystone virtues is the virtue of courage, right? I just wrote a book about courage a few years ago. Like courage is the source of all the advancements and innovations and changes in the world. Courage is obviously super important. So I'm not saying that. And what I would say is if you don't believe you can do something, if you don't think you can do something, you're definitely not going to be able to do it. The problem is, the problem with ego is just because you believe you can do something doesn't mean that you can do it, right? The key variable there is reality, is confidence, is skill.

9:15And I think confidence is better than ego if we could define confidence as based on something real, right? Like I've said before, or I've said before, I don't believe in myself. I have evidence, right? I have evidence of what I'm capable of because of the things that I've done. Now, when I quit my corporate job to write a book, how did I know I could succeed? Well, I didn't. I didn't know that I could succeed. I thought that I could succeed, And I knew that I wasn't a quitter. I knew that I practiced. I knew that I had good mentors. I knew that I was good at asking for advice. And I also knew that if I did fail, who cares?

10:01It wasn't going to be bad. Like, I'm not going to end up under a bridge somewhere. I'll just, I'll have to deal with that failure. It will hurt. And I'll grow and I'll change and I'll go in a different direction. And so I think understanding that, again, thinking you're perfect, thinking that everything you do turns to gold, that you're a genius, that's a really dangerous attitude. But also thinking that it's impossible, that everyone's better than you, that the game is rigged. Those are also kind of egotistical things to think. But if you go, look, I work hard, I ask questions, I've got a great team, there's a lot of opportunities.

10:37A lot of really dumb people have been super successful. You know, you can do it. And I think that is a really good balance of those extremes. And actually, you know, I showed at the beginning, I showed that picture of Plato's Academy. Aristotle famously had the idea of the golden mean. Do you know what this is? No. The golden mean says that every virtue sits as a midpoint between two vices. So for courage, he said there's recklessness on one end, right, which is too risky, it's dangerous, it's, you know, not thinking about the consequences. And then on the other hand, there's cowardice, which is afraid to take risks.

11:13And he said courage is in the middle, right? It's the right amount at the right time, the right situation. And I think that's true for confidence, too. If you don't believe in yourself, you're not going to be able to do anything. If all you have is belief in yourself, that's probably dangerous, too. In the middle, you want competence and competence and a sense of what you're capable of. And then someone asked, you know, how do you keep your team members interested, if not through passion, right? If the Stoics are saying that passion is bad, that being passionate is something to be wary of, how do you keep them motivated?

11:46I mean, sports is a great example, right? You have to care. You have to want to win. You have to be invested. But if you're wound so tight, if you sweat every little thing, that's when you get in trouble with the refs. If you're down too much, you get defeated or despondent, right? You want to keep that sort of even keel. So, yeah, it's important. Motivation is really important. Getting a team emotionally invested is important. But if we're too emotionally invested, well, what happens when you have the perfect project set up and then COVID happens or some other thing, right? So I just think I'd much rather have a team rooted in a really great purpose, a really great sort of cause bigger than themselves, than a team really sort of wound up and worked up and excited.

12:33You know, again, I'd rather have confidence than, you know, excitement.

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