No One is Truly “Self-Made” | The Philosophy Behind High Achievers

0:05Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com.

0:55No one is truly self-made. After he lost everything in a shipwreck, Zeno washed up in Athens and walked into a bookstore, where the bookseller happened to be reading dialogues from Socrates. Thus introduced to philosophy, he would go on to become one of the most well-known and well-respected thinkers of his time, advising princes and kings and a generation of Greeks. That school, founded on the Stoapokile, would become Stoicism, a philosophy which endures to this day. On the surface, Zeno's story is extraordinary. Born as an upper-class wealthy merchant, he was forced to start over, build himself up from scratch, becoming truly a self-made man.

1:37But this is misleading, as most success narratives are, because Zeno would not have become Zeno without meeting Crates, a teacher nicknamed the door opener for what he did for so many students. Indeed, there is no great man or woman whose story does not involve being helped, guided, and inspired by other great men and women. There would be no Epictetus, as he studied under Musonius Rufus. There would be no Seneca without Attalus, no Chrysippus without Cleanthes, and no Cleanthes without Zeno. Why do you think Marcus Aurelius opens meditations with a list of the 17 influential figures who taught him, nurtured him, inspired him, helped him?

2:17When I talked to Arnold Schwarzenegger on the Daily Stoic podcast, he talked about this very idea. And in fact, he references how inspired he was by meditations in the final chapter of his fantastic book, Be Useful. On the surface, Arnold seems like the ultimate example of the idea of the self-made man. He was born and raised in a small village in Austria, and seemingly by his own sheer effort and determination, Arnold achieved extraordinary success in bodybuilding, acting, business, and politics. But as he told me, he didn't do it on his own. I've been a creation of hundreds of people, he said, thousands of people.

2:54It's unbelievable the amount of people that help me and push me, he said. We are all in debt, as we've talked about here, the Daily Stoic. We are all the sum of the debts and lessons, as book one of Meditations is titled. We accumulate from countless people who shape our lives. We are the product of our influences, our environments, our family, and our friends. Success is a collaborative effort, and the myth of the self-made man is just that, a myth. There has never been such a thing, and there never will be.

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5:32It's sort of a surprising secret weapon, but it is. It's a secret weapon being talked about in corporate boardrooms and on military bases, locker rooms of professional sports teams, hedge funds, world-changing NGOs. Stoicism is a thing that some of the best organizations and institutions in the world are using to be better at what they do. I know this because I'm one of the people that goes and talks to him about it. I'm Ryan Holiday, the bestselling author of The Daily Stoic and many other books. And I've had the honor of being in the rooms with some pretty incredible people, from professional athletes to C-suite executives, world leaders, and even gave a talk at the White House.

6:16And in this video, I'm going to share some of the things that I share with those people. Stories I've told in my talks about Stoic philosophy. And I hope you like it. And look, most of the talks that I do, the public can't come to me. But if you want to come hear me talk about Stoic philosophy in person, I do have a few shows coming up. And you can click the link in the description below or just go to dailystoiclive.com to find a city near you.

6:53Stoicism is not a recipe for being a better sociopath. It is a philosophy built around the common good. It's interesting. I feel like if you asked someone who is vaguely familiar with Stoicism, they said, you know, do you know about the Stoic circles of concern? They would go, oh, yeah, that's your only concern with what's in your control. They're confusing that with the dichotomy of control. The dichotomy of control is there's some stuff that's not up to us, and then there's this tiny little bit that's up to us. The circles of concern is a much more beautiful, much more powerful idea, which comes to us from Hierocles, a little-known Stoic, who said that we exist in a series of concentric circles, which we are the center of.

7:32Yes, we love ourselves, but we come to love our parents who took care of us. We come to love our spouse or our children. We love our fellow citizens. We love our neighboring countries. We love bigger and bigger groups of people. And you could expand these circles outwards to include animals, to include the planet, to include unborn future generations. Hierocles says that the work of philosophy, growth as a human being, is about being able to expand those circles or to bring those outer circles inwards. To care about people that you've never met. To care about people who have never been born. You don't control them, sure, but you care about having a positive impact on them.

8:21Wisdom isn't something anyone can give us. We have to earn it to do the work. That's what I think is so interesting about AI. People are talking about what it's going to replace, you know, that it's the sum total of all human knowledge, except you still have to interpret what it spits out. I was working on something on the wisdom book, which I was just finishing, and there was a quote that I, you know, as I read, I take all these notes and I forgot to say where I'd gotten a quote from. I'd marked that it was a quote, but I wanted to check who it was from. I asked ChatGPT, I said, where does this quote from Lincoln come from?

8:55And it said, oh, that's actually not a quote about Lincoln. It said, that's Mark Twain talking about Charles Dickens or something like that. I said, I don't know. I'm pretty sure it's about Lincoln. And it said, oh yeah, you're totally right? That's Tolstoy talking about Lincoln. And I thought, oh, no, I just read Tolstoy's very famous meditation on Lincoln. And I knew it wasn't in there. And I said, I'm pretty sure it's not. I think it's from his secretary, John Hay. And it says, oh, yes, you're totally right. It's from secretary John Hay. And I said, really? Can you prove it? Where's it from?

9:30And he said, oh, it's in book 11 of their biography of lincoln and uh i pulled up book 11 and it was about something totally different where this quote wouldn't have been i said no it's not and it said you're right it's not but they said something very similar and what i realized what struck me is sure this is the sum total of all human wisdom but it also is trying to tell me what it thinks i want to hear right it can't say I don't know it can't say that I'm confused it's trying to fool me so I will leave it alone right and so even this incredible tool and I had no problem with tools I prefer a lot of analog things but I'm always interested in how new tools can help you and make you better what struck me about this is oh still even wisdom intelligence skill insight the ability to communicate all the sort of things that go into wisdom, experience, intuition.

10:30I just had a sense of where this quote was coming from. Without this, I would have been fooled one or two or three or four different times. And so even now with this magical thing at our fingertips, without a strong base of experience, a strong sense of historical knowledge, without an ability to spot bullshit, it, you're going to get eaten alive.

10:58I lost my copy of meditations on the flight here. I left it on the plane, one I'd had for several years. That's how it goes. There's a funny Epictetus story. He has this lamp in his house. It's his prized lamp in this shrine that he has. And he wakes up one evening and he hears someone in his house, a thief is broken in and they steal it. And he says to himself, you can only lose what you have. And the next day he goes and he buys a cheaper one. To him, it was a reminder about why we can't cling to possessions, take them too seriously. Thankfully, I published my own edition, so I have an endless supply, but

11:36I did lose all my notes, which I'm pretty upset about. Not my original copy. I don't travel with that one for precisely that reason. I'll lose it someday, I'm sure. It could go up in a fire or whatever. That's Epictetus' lesson from that. But we're told that after his death, a fan buys the wooden lamp for a small fortune as a reminder of the power of the philosophy, thus missing the whole point of the lamp.

12:05Stoicism was what partly inspired me to drop out of college. It's partly what inspired me to quit my marketing and business career. It was scary. I didn't know if it would work, but stoicism is a philosophy around logic. Part of how it helps you through hard things is it walks you through the costs and the benefits. It tells you that life is scary and that a life without risk is impossible and that you've got to be brave enough to meet it. It says, look back at earlier parts of your life. Look at your life as a whole. How did you get where you were by taking risks by doing things everything that's good in our life is on the other side of some courageous decision sometimes minor sometimes major the courage to talk to someone the courage to go out for something to raise your hand for something the courage to try something the courage to speak up about something courage to quit something that wasn't working to reject the status quo in the hope of a better future marcus says that everything is a chance to practice virtue what does he mean virtue is a hard word i think people see it as self-righteousness they associate it with virtue signaling or they associate it with this religion or that religion but for the stoics virtue was not one thing but actually four things and to look at those four stoic virtues we have to go back to the founding of stoicism which itself came out of disaster zeno is a merchant in the mediterranean in the fourth century he's a dealer in what's called Tyrian purple.

13:36It's this exclusive and incredibly rare purple dye that would make the garments of the wealthiest and fanciest Greeks. And later, when Marcus would assume the purple, become the emperor, that's what they were referring to. He would wear the purple cloak of Roman royalty. Zeno is traveling with his convoy of ships through the Mediterranean when he encounters a storm or pirates or runs aground, and he loses everything. He washes up in Athens penniless, And he ends up in a bookstore. And there, hearing the works of Socrates read aloud, having a conversation with the dead, fulfilling a prophecy from the oracle at Delphi, he is introduced to philosophy.

14:17He would say later that he made a great fortune when he suffered a shipwreck because it drove him to philosophy. He would set up a philosophical school on the Stoa Pochile, the painted porch, which is the name of my bookstore, on the Stoa Pochile in the Athenian Agora. That's where the Stoa in Stoicism comes from. He doesn't name the philosophy after himself. He names it after the school. So the Stoa Pochile is where Stoicism is brought into the world. And it comes out of this disaster. His great misfortune is actually not just his fortune, but our fortune. Here we are, all of us, influenced by the ideas that this man comes up with nearly 25 centuries ago.

15:02I sometimes struggle with the essential principle of stoicism, which is differentiating between things that we can control and we cannot. Me too. I mean, it's an entrepreneur. And as an entrepreneur, you need to do your best. But sometimes you need to do a little bit more. It's been fascinating for myself. I love it. But on the other hand, sometimes I think there's a moment when maybe I should get some peace, you know? Yeah. And I want to take it back to you when you talked about your book. In this example, you write a book that's under your control, and then the marketing and the sales are not.

15:38But you can have some influence over them. Yeah, this is the tricky part. There's two parts. So one, acceptance is a stoic concept that I think a lot of us struggle with because we didn't get where we are by accepting things, right? Like you didn't accept no, you didn't accept the people who were rooting against you, you didn't accept the odds. You didn't accept any number of the problems that should have been career killers, company killers. You kept going. And through sheer force of will, you build whatever you build. Then we come up against something and we want to fight it and push against it.

16:15But it really is out of our control. It's the weather. It's what somebody else did. So acceptance is just accepting the facts. And then the part that's in my control is the response. What I tell myself about it and what I do next. So that's kind of how I try to think about acceptance. But yes, the black and whiteness of it's in your control and not in your control is tricky if you've done anything like marketing or we're talking about persuading people earlier. You don't control what other people think, but you can give them the tools or say things or present things that might allow them to change their mind.

16:45So there's probably a third category, something in the middle that is like what we have influence over or what we can nudge. And as long as we accept that it's not fully up to us and that we're making a probabilistic decision here or, you know, that's probably a safer way to come at it, then no, I can make people love this. Can't.

17:11So every day, totally free, we send out the daily Stoic email. It's the largest community of Stoics ever assembled in human history. and just one stoic idea, one ancient lesson to chew on every single day. I'd love to have you join us. If you like our videos, I think you'll like the email. It's also a podcast version of it too. You can sign up at dailystoic.com slash email.

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