Nobody Won Afraid Of Losing | Ask DS

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1:49Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away. 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. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording.

2:31Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

2:41Nobody won afraid of losing. It might not work. It could go very badly. You could be laughed at. You could take a financial hit. You could come in second. You could fail. You could even die. But is life without risk possible? Could you possibly hope to make it through the world? To borrow a powerful rhetorical question from meditations, could you possibly hope to do this without encountering any of these setbacks? Of course not. And this is why courage is such a critical virtue to the Stokes, because life demands it. You cannot do anything. Go anywhere. Be anyone without it. The greatest Stoics were defined by their ability to go out there and do what they thought needed to be done, despite the incredibly unlikely probability of success.

3:28Cato went against Caesar. His daughter Portia did the same. George Washington, in that winter of discontent at Valley Forge, drew on that exact example, putting on Addison's play about Cato to inspire himself and his men. Stockdale had every reason to think he would not survive, that he would not triumph over his captors, but he never gave in. We will not always win in life, but we will never win without an ability to face loss, without the courage to proceed anyway. Be not afraid. Be brave. Courage is the mother of all virtues, you could say. And in fact, Aristotle did say this because in a world that's not virtuous, It's a brave thing to go out there and do what needs to be done.

4:13The first book in the Stoic Virtue series is Courage is Calling. It's about that. Will you answer the call? And then this is followed by Discipline is Destiny. And then I just finished the next book in the series, Right Thing Right Now. You can head over and grab those at stuart.dailystoic.com. You can get them anywhere books are sold. Since you're listening to this right now, maybe you like audiobooks, you can grab audiobooks of them as well. Anywhere audiobooks are sold. Check them out.

4:47Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I'm going to bring you a Q &A today from a talk I did way back in November of 2020. To flash forward a little bit, by the way, I will be in Australia the last couple of days of July and August doing dates in Sydney and Melbourne. And then in November of 2024, I will also be in Canada and Europe. You can grab all those dates at ryanholiday.net slash tour. But I was doing a virtual offsite. This was back in COVID days, talking about obstacle and stillness. And they had some great questions on journaling. Then someone was asking me how stoicism can be practical and relevant in today's environment.

5:29Some folks asked me about my exercise routine, how I teach these stoic principles to my kids and a great introduction to stoicism. So that's what we'll get into today. And I hope to see you, not virtual, in person, either later this month in Australia or in Europe and Canada in the fall. Grab those dates at ryanholiday.net slash tour.

6:00so if you're journaling freeform daily it's not the first time i've been introduced to the concept but so i know a little bit about it but how how many journals do you go through and what do you do with them so i don't do anything with them because the value of them is the the act the process. These are not sort of records for history. These are not, you know, you know, drafts of things I'm writing. It is the time with the journal that is the upside. That is that I get it having finished, not reviewing it later for the most part. But I do, I actually use three journals and this might be too much for any one person, but I think each one of the ideas might independently be valuable.

6:44So the first journal I use, it's at my house, I can't show it to you, but I have this little journal, it's called the one line a day journal. And this is one of the ways I picked up the habit. It's a journal and it has five sections on each page. The idea being you write one thing about each day as the day happens. And then you have five years of what you did on that day. So I love, like I was writing in it this morning and it was like, oh, I was finishing a chapter in my most recent book on this day, 12 months ago. Like that's cool. Right. So the one line a day is like, I think a really easy way to start journaling and they make a bunch of different ones.

7:26There's like the one line a day journal for mothers and for college students. And, you know, there's all different ones like that, that are cool. But then, then I just do some free form journaling, like in a blank journal, I just talk about what I'm thinking, what I'm going through. Sometimes I log like my workout or I just kind of, it's just whatever I want. It's just a few minutes on the page. And then the third one I do, I made a journal a few years ago called the Daily Stoic Journal that gives you a question that you respond to in the morning and at night. So the other form of journaling, and I'm not trying to sort of pimp my own is like, there are all sorts of great journals out there that have prompts.

8:07And so if you have trouble journaling, finding a journal that gives you something to talk to yourself about, a question to answer, that can be a great way to form that practice. Thanks. Sorry for the digression, everybody, but I've always been curious about journaling. It's like meditating. I've tried it. I'm still wrestling with it because I have a hard time getting there and I'm still early days in it. So super small question now, Ryan, this is probably a yes or now. You ready? Yes. How can stoicism be effective, be practical, be relevant in today's environment, economic uncertainty, social and political divisiveness?

8:51I'll just keep it simple and end there. Well, so I used to joke, I would say, you know, you think these ideas are so distant. But the reality is, you know, the Stoics were, the ancients were going through divorce, and they were trying to make money, and they had all our problems, plus the plague. The idea that the distant past was so different than ours is really ridiculous. And I think really when you read the Stoics, I mean, book five of Meditations, speaking of what we were talking about, the opening passage in book five of Meditations is Marcus Aurelius having a discussion with himself about not wanting to get out of bed in the morning.

9:32And he says, oh, but it's so warm here under the covers. And you're like, this is, he is me and I am him. Like, we are the same, you know. So we tend to think of history as the thing in the past, but we are living through history and it gives you a sense of people are people and things have always been this way. What is your typical workout? I usually, so I try to run, swim or bike every single day. So I try to do one of the three. I usually try to do some sort of endurance thing. I like working out. I like CrossFit. I like those kinds of things. But as a writer, I think, you know, the sort of solitary, long chunk of time doing one intensely focused thing is usually has the best benefits for me.

10:18Do you try and teach these principles to your young children? And how is that going? I do. They're a little young for it specifically. So we're not quite there. you know I think I was just thinking about this the other day when you really go back to the ancient literature there's not really such thing as like children's stories there were just stories it's only you know later that we've decided that all children's books have to be about dragons who eat pizza and you know talking teddy bears and stuff there used to be sort of fables and sort of epics that the poems that you would teach lessons to kids so I spent a lot like a lot of the sort of bedtime stuff we do is like poetry or, you know, speeches or, you know, Aesop's fables, stuff like that.

11:08Best intro book to Stoicism? I'm a little biased. I mean, if you want to read, let's do it this way. If you want to read the actual Stoics, like the original, like one book by a Stoic, I think Marcus Aurelius, the Gregory Hayes translation is the most accessible. I did a book called The Daily Stoic. That is one page of stoic philosophy every day. But I also do a free email version of it, which you can get at dailystoic.com. So I think it can be hard to just say like, hey, I'm going to learn about a whole school of philosophy. I think doing it in a really digestible way, like as a page a day or an email a day or a podcast episode today is another pretty good way to do it.

11:51I think I just tell folks, and again, no one's making money on me doing this, but the obstacle is the way is the first of Ryan's books that I read of that trilogy. Someone on the line actually gifted me the Daily Stoic, which is where I sort of got started on your work. And that was one of the things I like about your writing is it's incredibly accessible. Now, you said earlier that in part is because that's how stoicism is structured. Yeah. But it's also the way you present it because these are old cats and old things about old times. But, but the thing that struck me is so surprising is, as you said, how relevant so much of their teachings and experiences are to today's world.

12:35And you actually put it together in a way that really is quite understandable and accessible and it's quick reading. And I would, I would recommend it. So one of our colleagues asked how the concept of anti-fragile over your right shoulder intersects with stoicism. Yeah, that's a great question. So Nassim Celeb is actually, I've gotten to know him over the years. You'll see the stoics sort of interspersed throughout his work. So I certainly don't think they're inconsistent with each other. I think the idea of anti-fragile and the idea and just the phrase, the obstacle is the way, are essentially saying the same thing.

13:14You can be worse for what's happened or you can be better for what's happened. And anti-fragile just means you're the kind of thing, as he says, that gets stronger from disorder or from difficulty or from challenges. And I think a person who lives the idea that the obstacle is the way, that what stands in the way is the way, that everything you experience is an opportunity to get better, to practice virtue. I think that's essentially saying the same thing. I think Nassim's background is much more in finance and he has sort of a mathematical analysis for a lot of what he's talking about. I tend to just look at history and go, look, almost every great person has been through some sort of adversity or difficulty in their life.

13:55It's inevitable running a business, running a family, being a human being that things will not go your way. Murphy's law, what can go wrong will. So are you gonna be wrecked by those things or those things gonna create opportunities for you? If it's the latter, you'll get better. if it's the former I don't think you're going to last long

14:17hey 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 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

14:59We'll see you next time.

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