Navigating Success and Adversity | Stoic Lessons on Wealth and Fortune

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1:44Welcome 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.

2:23hey it's ryan welcome to another episode of the daily stoic podcast every once in a while something about like my work will go viral enough that like people i know will send it back to me you know something pierces the consciousness when your mom sends it back to you one of her friends sent it to her and then she sent it to me. And I'll play you this clip real fast. So basically this guy is walking out of a conference or something and someone asks him a question. Excuse me, sir. Excuse me, sir. Question for you. Have you ever been broke before? I've been broke and I've been broke. What do you do for living out here in Houston, Texas?

3:01I'm in private equity. You're in private equity. Now I go all over the country just asking success for people, how they made it for the younger generation. Could I get just one minute of your time real quick. What was the most amount of money that you ever made in a single year? In 2019, I sold 76 companies for 1.27 billion. $1.27 billion. And do you come from a lot of money? No. What was the number one book that changed your life? Yeah. My number one book is Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. Number one takeaway from that book? Everything that you want is on the other side of your ego. You got to get your ego out of the way.

3:27Use people to get to where you need to go. So when I saw this, I said, oh, I know that guy. His name is Eddie Wilson. I had just spoken at At his conference, I'd flown to Salt Lake City. I spoke at the Grand American Hotel. It was a day in, day out thing for me, but it was called The Money Is Mastermind. And it was like, it was about how individuals, entrepreneurs, large businesses can get better at the money side of things, make their businesses profitable. And then what do you do when you are successful? How do you manage that success? What do you do with wealth? And it's funny how he talks about that in the clip.

4:06He says there's been periods where he didn't have money, but he's never been poor. That's actually an interesting encapsulation of the Stoic idea of wealth, right? We did this course, The Wealthy Stoic, last year, which I think is really good. It's a daily Stoic guide to being rich, happy, and free. Some people who are not fans of us got mad and said, oh, they're trying to turn Stoicism into the prosperity gospel, or they're trying to make Stoicism a get-rich-quick scheme. But actually, our definition of wealth is what he was saying, that you cannot have money and be rich, and you can be rich and very poor at the same time.

4:42And that's one of the things I want to talk about in the talk I gave, which I'll run for you now, some Stoic lessons about money, personal finance, wealth building, but also how you integrate money into your life and you achieve real wealth and financial freedom as opposed to the piling up of material goods, which none of the Stoics would have considered to be wealthy. And if you want to check out the Wealthy Stoic, I think the course is awesome. I'll link to that in today's show notes. Also, if you sign up for Daily Stoic Life, dailystoiclife.com, you get that course and all our other courses for free.

5:26But I thought it was cool. I mean, this clip went on to do millions and millions of views. So it was nice of him to recommend Ego is the Enemy. And I do think ego is the enemy of not just achieving success, but certainly of maintaining and appreciating and being grateful for whatever success you have. Seneca talks about the poverty of needing more and more. And that isn't just money. It can also be validation, attention, relevance, achievement, dopamine hits, whatever. So I was really proud of this talk. It's not a talk I've given before. I'm not sure I'll give it again, but I wanted to run it for you guys.

5:57And thanks to The Money Is, folks, for having me out. And thanks for their very nice recommendation of Ego is the Enemy. Enjoy.

6:08There's an interesting philosopher named Thales who, He was concerned that as he talked about money and its role in life, that people would think he was just speaking like sour grapes. So he speculates and makes a fortune in the olive oil market so he can be comfortable as he pursues philosophy and he can know what he's talking about, which I think is funny. But specifically, I wanted to start with this Stoic philosopher named Zeno. Long before he was a Stoic philosopher, Zeno was a merchant. He comes from a long family of merchants. He dealt in what was known as Tyrian purple. Tyrian purple was the dye.

6:53It was incredibly rare. It was made from the crushed blood of shellfish. It was incredibly difficult to make in the ancient world, but it was beautiful. and it was what would go into making the cloaks of the wealthiest Greeks and then Romans. So he was this dealer of purple. He would travel all over the Mediterranean selling this, trading it, bartering it, traitoring it. And all is going well. He's taken over his father's business until he suffers a shipwreck. And he loses everything in this shipwreck. He washes up penniless in Athens. This is a day before venture capital, before insurance. He loses everything.

7:31And so you'd think that Zeno would be devastated. His life's task has been taken from him. He barely escaped with his life at all. And he's destitute. And yet, his first quip, he would say, well done fate to drive me thus to philosophy. Because as he washes up penniless in Athens, he ends up in a bookstore where he hears a man reading the works of Socrates. This turns him onto philosophy. He would go on to found the Stoa pochile. That's what Stoicism means. Stoa just means porch. And Zeno, because of his merchant background, starts Stoicism on this porch in the center of the Athenian agora, where all the business is being transacted.

8:14And he would go on to change the world. We're still talking about this philosophy that he founds almost 2 ,500 years later. And I think part and parcel of Stoicism is this quip from Zeno. He said, I made a great fortune when I suffered a shipwreck, right? Because it opened up this whole path in life that he could never have conceived of, that he wouldn't have chosen. But being stuck with it, having this disruptive life event happen to him, changes the course of his life. And of course, he responds to it well, turns to philosophy and becomes this great teacher. Now, I think embodied in this story, I think it's fitting that stoicism is founded out of a disaster.

8:54Because the core principle of the philosophy is basically this idea that we don't control what happens to us in life, but we control how we respond to what happens to us in life. And so as Zeno embodies this in Greece around the fourth century, it would come down to us through Marcus Aurelius, who would write about it in meditations, the most powerful man in the world writing these little notes to himself about how to be better, about how to live up to his potential, about how to manage the stress and responsibility that's been put upon him. And he writes in meditations, he says, look, our actions can be impeded, but nothing can impede our intentions or dispositions.

9:32We can accommodate and adapt. He says we can convert to our own purposes the obstacle to our acting. That's what Zeno did. He thought he was put on this planet to be a merchant. It turns out he didn't even know what he didn't know, and that he was meant to be a philosopher. Marcus says the impediment to action advances action. what stands in the way becomes the way. Basically, Stoicism is saying that any and every situation, no matter how bad or undesirable it is, no matter how unexpected it is, no matter how disruptive or costly it is, no matter how painful it is, we always have this opportunity to practice virtue or excellence.

10:12The four virtues that Zeno lays down are courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. We're going to talk about some of those today. But the idea is that every situation is a chance to practice courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. Extreme success, extreme adversity, it's always a chance to practice one of these virtues. This is the idea. The obstacle is the way. That there's always a chance to grow. There's always a chance to learn. There's always a chance to change. There's always an opportunity we can find. There's always an opportunity that we can make. I went through I wrote this book the obstacles away about 10 years ago.

10:51I've been through some stuff in my life And then in the fall of 2019 My wife and I fell in love with this little old building in the town that we live outside Austin, Texas And it was probably a crazy idea under normal circumstances But we decided we're going to turn it in to a little independent bookstore and all was going well We thought we had this wonderful plan. We thought we knew how it would go. And we started construction in March of 2020. It was like a rest of development. I think I've made a huge mistake. And it certainly felt that way at the time. And look, it would have been hard under ordinary circumstances.

11:30It probably would have been more expensive under ordinary circumstances. It would have taken longer under ordinary circumstances. But all that collides into this global pandemic. And so, yeah, it was difficult. It was tough. We ran into all sorts of obstacles. But I remember writing this note to myself in the depths of the pandemic as I stared out over a very empty bookstore. It was not empty of stuff. It had all been kitted out. There's just no customers. And I wrote, 2020 is a test. Will this make you a better person or a worse person? And this is what Zeno is talking about. This is what Marcus Aurelius is talking about.

12:07Will this make you better or worse. We don't choose the situation. We don't choose the market conditions. We don't choose what other people do, but we choose what we do. We choose who we are in relation to these things happening. Now, the bookstore did end up opening. That was cool. My wife and I are still married, so I consider that a success. And then it's been really fun. And look, life can challenge you in both ways, as we're going to talk about. Sometimes something turns out to be way harder than you expected. Other times it turns out to be way more successful than you thought. And so this little town in Texas ended up being a town that pretty much everyone seems to be moving to these days.

12:47Elon Musk moved Starlink, SpaceX, Tesla, and the Boring Company all within about five minutes of the bookstore. So now it's dealing with this thing that we thought would be this little side project and be fun and cool that ended up taking more time and costing more than we expected. And then as it succeeded, taking up more time and costing more than we expected, but for very different reasons, right? And so the idea is that life is going to throw us in these situations that are not of our making, that are not necessarily of our choosing. They're certainly going to flummox our expectations or plans, but we don't control that.

13:21What we control is how we respond, right? And when I say the obstacle is the way, I don't mean to be glib about this. It's not always a chance to succeed professionally. It's not always a chance to make more money or grow the brand or grow your followers, right? Sometimes stuff just sucks. But there is always something that you can do personally. There's some way that you can grow and change and be better for what you went through, which is what Zeno was saying. He lost a fortune in that shipwreck, but he made a very different kind of fortune. So given what you guys are all here to discuss, I thought it might be interesting, instead of just talking about how the Stoics can make us successful, because I think you guys are pretty good in that department.

14:04I wanted to think about what did the Stoics specifically have to say about that, about fortune, about money? Because they had a lot to say. Again, these weren't philosophers who sat on the sidelines. These weren't philosophers who took vows of poverty. These were people who managed estates, who ran businesses, who ran for public office, who were involved in the reality of life. So what do they have to tell us about money? And I think Marcus Aurelius had quite a bit of it as the head of the largest empire that ever lived. But I think the first thing the Stoics can teach us when it comes to money and our finances is about this idea of resilience.

14:40Now, Seneca is one of my favorite Stoics. Who here is familiar with the idea of positive visualization, right? You want to imagine things going well. You want to work yourself into the right headspace. You want to see all the things that can happen so you can walk yourself through it. Well, the Stoics are saying that's all well and good. If you don't think it can happen, it's probably not going to happen. But the Stoics also practice an exercise that's maybe a little more depressing. We call this negative visualization. The Latin phrase for this is premeditatio malorum, which translates to a premeditation of evils.

15:16Seneca says we have to rehearse them in our minds, exile, torture, war, and shipwreck. He says all the terms of the human lot shall be before our eyes. Now, it's good that Seneca said this, as you'll see later. Pretty much all these things do happen to him. The ancient world was not a fun place. But Seneca is saying you've got to be prepared. He's saying the one thing a leader can never say is, wow, I didn't think that would happen, right? Or as sometimes we say, I didn't think it would happen to me, right? If it can happen, it can happen to you. If it's happened before, it can happen again. And just because it's never happened before doesn't mean that it can't happen, right?

15:54And so part of our philosophical approach from the Stoics is envisioning this, not to be anxious or full of dread, but to have a plan, right? To figure out how you would respond. Seneca says that the following rule that we have to cling to tooth and nail is not to give in to adversity. So he's not giving up because it could go bad. He's saying, but also not to trust prosperity. and he says to always take full note of habits, fortune, of behaving just as she pleases and treating her as if she would do what it is in her power to do. This is Murphy's law, what can go wrong will. I think premeditatio malorum is not just imagining it going well, but doing a postmortem, right?

16:36Sorry, not just doing a postmortem, but doing a pre-mortem, If you were going to go in for an operation, you would want the doctors to think about these, not just to go like, oh, we'll figure it out in the postmortem after they're dead. You would want them to do a premortem. So if this unlikely scenario were to come to pass, they would not be rattled by it. They would not be surprised by it. They would do something about it. Seneca says the unexpected blow lands heaviest. And so this was part of his actual practice. He would practice poverty once a month. He was a very wealthy man, but he would once a month wear rags, wear his worst clothes, eat either, I guess today we call this intermittent fasting, but he would deprive himself of food and finery, and he would experience what it was like to live a very different kind of life.

17:29And his point, this wasn't just to toughen himself up, although I think that came from it. But he's saying that he wanted to ask himself this question, is this what you're so afraid of? Is this what keeps you up at night? The idea of having to take a step back, the idea of being without these things. And what I love about this exercise, what you realize when you sort of take a step back sometimes is you go, hey, this was my life not that long ago. I was plenty fine with not traveling first class before or not having this nice of a car or not eating at these kinds of restaurants. When we take these step backs, we realize, okay, it's nice that we have these things, but we don't need them.

18:12The Stoics had this great term. They would say, look, a Stoic should be able to handle anything, good or bad. But they said, if you have a choice, there's certain things you would choose. They called these preferred indifference. So they were plenty okay with whatever would happen. But if they had to choose between being rich or poor, of course they would choose rich, right? Just like you'd probably choose being tall than short or healthy versus not healthy. But you'd be okay either way. That's what the Stoics were trying to do. And I think what's interesting is we think that success is going to make us feel good.

18:45We think it's going to make us feel secure, right? Once I get to this number, once I get to this place, then I'll feel like I'm okay. But the reality is what often happens is this makes us less, or it makes us more risk averse because now we're afraid of losing what we just had, right? Our expectations, our comfort level expands to fit where we are now. And then instead of feeling good, instead of feeling okay, instead of feeling happy, now we feel worried because we don't want to lose it, right? It makes us scared. And part of the reason we feel scared is that we don't trust ourselves, right?

19:20We think we can't live without certain comforts. And so one of the things I think that have been good about the last couple of years that the Stoics would say is that they have been so unpredictable. They have been so hard in many ways. They have been so challenging. Seneca says that he pities anyone who hasn't been in the ring and been beaten and bloodied and bruised. He said, because they don't know what they're capable of. They don't know what they can endure, right? And so because the pandemic has been challenging, and I'm sure all of you have gone through other challenges in your life, because of what you went through, you should have a sense of security that you were fine then, you'll be fine if it happens again.

20:02It's better that it's this way now. It's a preferred indifferent. But you're okay if things change. And so whether the future holds bull markets or bear markets, and what we can say for certain is that the road ahead is uncertain. That's the one thing we know for sure, right? The sense of resiliency comes from our understanding of our ability to turn it into something, to handle it well, right? To be made better for it and not worse.

20:35We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at The Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a bestselling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence. My wife introduced me to Dr.

21:12Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for good inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, Empathetic Kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr. Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being.

21:53And daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events.

22:07Now, this takes discipline, of course. The Stoics would point out that, you know, generals have been vying over swaths of territory. Business people have been fighting over trying to corner this market or that market. People count themselves as important by nature of how many people work for them or how big their empire is. But the Stoics would say, look, the greatest empire is command of yourself, that we have this empire here between our ears that many of us are not in command of because we're jealous, because we're anxious, because we're comparing ourselves to other people, right? Command of ourselves.

22:45If we're not in control of our desires, if we're not in control of our spending, if we're not in control of our habits, how powerful are we really? And so Mark Surrealist reminds himself, look, you can live well even in a palace. So he was famous for his austere habits, even as the emperor of Rome. Epictetus, who's Marx Reelius's favorite philosopher, is a slave in Nero's regime. And he gets to know and see Seneca up close, Seneca being one of the most powerful politicians at that time. So these two men have very different experiences amidst the abundance and uncertainty that was Nero's regime.

23:25And Epictetus looks around at all these powerful people, all these important people, and he sees that actually they're not that powerful because they're always wanting more and more and more, and they're not in control of their habits. He would say that it's better to starve to death in a calm and confident state of mind than live anxiously amidst abundance. Seneca would see these same people at his parties, and he would say that they were insatiable, and that nothing could ever fill them up because they wanted more and more and more always. There's a story that Epictetus tells us about watching what was previously a very wealthy Roman go up to the emperor Nero and plead with him saying, I'm down to my last million dollars.

24:11And Nero says, oh my God, are you okay? How can you bear it? And Seneca and Epictetus would both look at this man as one of the poorest people in the world, even though he has still quite a bit of money, right? Because his attachment to things, his need for things, the value he set on things made it outside of his grasp, and it meant that there was never enough. Epictetus looked at another story in Nero's regime that I love. He sees a powerful Roman politician sucking up to Nero's cobbler as a way of currying favor with the emperor. He sees this man who he thinks is powerful debasing himself, right, to getting the good graces of this other person.

24:55And Epictetus says, for the sake of mighty and dignified offices and honors, you kiss the hands of another man's slaves, and thus are the slaves of men who are not free themselves. His point is that the things that we need, the things that we want often take control of us. Epictetus would, or Seneca would point out how everyone is a slave to something, right? Because we need it, we want it. And if it's not in our control, if it's not something we can give ourselves, then someone else has a certain amount of power over us. So for the Stoics, it wasn't that they enjoyed none of the pleasures of life, that they were closer to the Epicureans than you might think, but they did try to control their wants, and they did try to keep their needs in check.

25:40Marcus Reus reminds himself that very little is needed for the happy life. And again, we remember how well we got by on so much less not that long ago. And some of us might look back fondly on those days when we were sleeping on a cot or eating ramen or working much harder than we did now, because we had certain purpose. There was a certain clarity. There was so much less stress. And so Seneca is reminding us that when we limit our desires to with what is in our means, to what is within our control, then we have a happiness that can't be taken from us. And he would say it's worth remembering that there's more than one way to be poor.

26:20There is, of course, the poverty of not having nearly enough, being destitute, of being broken. This is what Seneca is practicing on a regular basis, just reminding himself how many millions of people live with so much less. But he's also trying to remind himself that people who need more and more and more and more are poor, even if they already have so much. He's trying to get to a place of enough, right? And if we can have enough, this protects us. It doesn't necessarily mean we stop trying to do anything else. We're just coming at what we do from a place of fullness rather than a place of desperation and craving.

26:59There's a story about Epictetus he has this little shrine in his house to the gods, and his prized possession is there. He has a silver lamp, and this lamp is burning incense to the gods. It's his perpetual sacrifice. And one day, he's in bed, and he hears some noise in the hallway, and he realizes someone is breaking into his house and stealing his lamp. And by the time he rushes out there, the lamp and the thief are gone. and Epictetus says to himself, he says, you know what? Tomorrow you're gonna go get a cheaper lamp. He says, you can only lose what you have. And the fact that you put all this importance on this thing is what made you vulnerable to someone stealing it, right?

27:40He finds out his lamp is stolen and he gets a cheaper one, right? It's realizing that the things we own, own us in a way, right? That there's a cost to everything outside just the price we pay for them. And there's the insurance, there's the worrying, there's the maintenance, there's the comparison, there's figuring out how to use this complicated remote for this thing that's not that much better than the one you can just get from the store, right? The Stoics are trying to get to a place of freedom, right? And I was thinking about this idea, what money is, what money is to me, what success is to me in a word is this word, autonomy, right?

28:18Right. Success and money should be getting you freedom. And if they don't, what good are they? Right. This is what Epictetus was saying, that because of the things you want, because of your definition of success and power and importance, you become a slave to other people, to other things, to systems, to lifestyles. Right. And thus, this thing that you thought would set you free is, in fact kind of a gilded cage. To me, rich is how much you see your kids. Power is how much control you have over your own schedule. Success to me is the ability to say no. That big, complete sentence of a word, no.

29:01This is the writer E.B. White. He's asked to join a prestigious presidential commission. He says, I must decline for secret reasons. Here he is turning down the president. I love it. The performance psychologist, Jonathan Fader, sent me this picture, which I keep on my wall between two pictures of my children. It's just a man in his office with a giant sign behind him that says no. And I have next to it a memo that I bought at an auction as part of President Truman's papers. This is a memo. His secretary is passing it around. The president is besieged with inquiries. And she says, you know, because of all these inquiries, I think we have to beg to be excused.

29:45And Truman gets a hold of it and he underlines it. And he says, the proper response is underlined HST. So here we have the busiest man in the world needing to exert some discipline over himself and his staff to not say yes to everything that comes his way. He's in control of nuclear weapons, but his own schedule is this constant battle. Here's actually an ideal day in my calendar. This is not because I'm not working. What I have not done is scheduled interruptions from the work that I want to be doing, right? That's time for me to write. That's time for me to think. That's time for me to read.

30:25It's a reminder that everything we say yes to means saying no to something else, right? We don't want to say no, so we don't want to hurt someone's feelings, right? But we're actually fine hurting our own feelings and the other people who count on us, our family, our colleagues, our friends, we're fine hurting them. We just don't want to hurt the person in front of us right now. We'll deliver bad news to someone else, but not this person in front of us. And conversely, when we say no, right, we're also able to say yes to the things that matter, that are important to us, right? that only we can do.

31:00And when I say success and power is autonomy, Seneca here is a cautionary tale, right? Nero, as you can imagine, was not a good boss. Seneca grows very wealthy in Nero's service. He sees himself as the adult in the room. He sees himself as making a bad situation less bad, as keeping the guardrails on, the adult supervision. But as a result of this sort of corrupt and ultimately deranged boss, Seneca finds his own freedom, his own freedom of movement slowly, slowly impeded. Not just he has to work more and more and more, but then when he has enough, when he realizes that what's happening is contrary to his values and he tries to quit, Nero says, no, sorry, that's not how it works.

31:44You don't just get to come in here and then leave when you want. And so Seneca can't leave. And ultimately when Seneca tries to leave, Nero sends goons and they kill him, right? He can't leave. He paid the ultimate price for this fortune that he had. And ultimately then, how good was this fortune, right? And I think that's another important thing the Stoic can teach us about money. To them, the question would not be, how much do you have? But does it make you better, right? How has it changed you for better or for worse. And in his meditations, Mark Cirellus, suddenly given absolute power, which we know is supposed to corrupt absolutely, is having to fight against this.

32:25And he writes, he says, beware of becoming Caesarified, of being dyed in purple. He's talking about the purple dye that Zeno's family traded in. He's trying not to be changed by the power and responsibility and wealth that's been given to him. He doesn't want it to become normal because he fundamentally understands that it isn't normal. And so his discipline, as we talked about, is about keeping himself simple and good and guileless and dignified and unpretentious. He's basically saying that ego is the enemy, right? The sense that you deserve this, that you're important, that there should be a richest person in the world and that person should be you, that there should be a most powerful person in the world and that person should be you, that you should have this life or death responsibility, this can change us and not always for the better.

33:16And what ego does is it overreaches and it neglects and alienates. It takes unnecessary risks, causes unnecessary problems. I was a director of marketing at American Apparel for many years and I saw this billion dollar company go effectively to zero. That's what ego can do. It sucks us down like the law of gravity, the expression goes. It can take it all to zero. And so how did Marcus manage to be good amidst this corruptive power and wealth and success and fame? Well, his example always was his mother, who he thanks at the beginning of his meditations. The second entry in meditations is Marcus Aurelius reflecting on what he learned from the example of his mother, who had, with the loss of Marcus's father, inherited an enormous, sprawling business empire that she ran for all of his life.

34:11He would say what he loved about her was her reverence for the divine, her generosity. He said her inability not only to do wrong, but to even conceive of doing it. And the simple way she lived, not the least like the rich. And so the Stoics would say that success is best worn lightly because we know it can change, because we know it shouldn't change us. And that's what Marcus Reyes writes. He says you want to accept what comes to you in life without arrogance, and you want to let go of it with indifference, good or bad. It doesn't say anything about you positively. It doesn't say anything about you negatively.

34:52Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us, and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.

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