Oh, You’re Free, Are You? | Only Fools Rush In

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:14Ryan Holiday: Oh, you're free, are you? We bristle at the thought. We push back at the first sign of being controlled or coerced. No one gets to tell us what to do. We have rights. We have protections. It's our life. Americans especially, but people all over the world are protective of their freedoms. That's a good thing. Citizens should be diligent. But there is a part of these protests that call to mind a story that Seneca tells us about a condemned criminal begging for their life to be spared. Oh, the emperor said, you call this being alive? We're prickly about our freedom as we willingly submit to all sorts of addictions.

0:56Ryan Holiday: You are enslaved to your phone. You spend every waking second thinking about work. You can't go a night without drink. You can't stop racking up credit card debt. You need to be liked by everyone. No one enslaved you. You enslaved yourself. So how free are you really?

1:24Ryan Holiday: We just got back from this trip to Europe and it was so ungodly hot there. Like it was the hottest it's ever been, which exacerbated another experience. If you've ever been to Europe, just how bad the mattresses are there. So I was excited to be home because we've been gone for a while, but I was really excited to be home and sleep on my eight sleep pod. I missed it every night I was gone. It cools the mattress, cools my wife's side differently than my side. It doesn't matter how hot the room is. The bed is just perfect. Monitors your sleep rate. I was putting my son to bed last night, reading to him, and then I get a little alert on my phone that it was almost time for me to go to bed, that the eight sleep was doing its thing.

2:11Ryan Holiday: Then I woke up this morning. It showed me my sleep score. Monitors your heart rate, your respiratory rate. You can see the difference that having a pod on your mattress makes, and their autopilot feature even learns your sleep patterns. It adjusts the temperatures, the elevation, the wake-up time. Pod users report up to 32 % improvement in sleep quality and up to 34 % more deep sleep. You can use my code dailystoic at 8sleep.com slash stoic for up to$350 off, and you get 30 days to try it at home and return it if you don't love it. I know I got a bunch of talks coming up. I got a bunch of travel coming up.

2:49Ryan Holiday: I got a bunch of videos I'm going to do. So I was, I was starting to think about what I'm going to wear. And so I was shopping for some basics from Quince. I've been wearing a bunch. You've almost certainly seen me in their stuff. Their clothes are built to last, made with premium materials, and they're the kind of stuff you reach for every day. Quince specializes in everyday staples that work harder. Ultra soft organic cotton tees, Mongolian cashmere sweaters, everything in between. Everything that Quince has is priced 50 to 80 percent less than what you'd find from similar brands. Quince works directly with ethical factories, cuts out the middlemen, so you're getting premium materials without the markup.

3:29Ryan Holiday: If you're still hanging on to the same worn out basics, Quince makes it easy to upgrade. And if you want to upgrade your everyday, Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash stoic to get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK. That's quince.com slash stoic.

3:53Ryan Holiday: Only fools rush in. A good person is invincible, Epictetus says in Discourses 3.6, for they don't rush into contests in which they aren't the strongest. If you want their property, take it. Take also their staff, profession, and body. But you will never compel what they set out for nor trap them in what they should avoid. For the only contest the good person enters is that of their own reasoned choice. How can such a person not be invincible? And then the entry is, One of the most fundamental principles of martial arts is that strength should not go against strength. That is, don't try to beat your opponent where they are strongest.

4:34Ryan Holiday: But for some reason, that's exactly what we try to do when we undertake some impossible task we haven't bothered to think through or we let someone put us on the spot or we say yes to whatever comes our way. Some people think that choosing your battles is weak or calculating. But how could reducing the amount of times we fail or minimize the needless injuries inflicted on us be weak? How is that a bad thing? As the saying goes, discretion is the better part of valor. Stokes call it reasoned choice. That means be reasonable. Think hard before choosing and make yourself unbeatable. A book I've recommended many, many times, I sell it here at The Painted Porch, is Zero to One by Peter Thiel.

5:10Ryan Holiday: Peter Thiel says the whole point of business and life is to find where you have a monopoly, where you're the only one doing that thing. There's another book that I rave about that we carry here in the store called Blue Ocean Strategy. There's another one called Blue Ocean Shift that I actually did the marketing for. But the idea is red oceans is where there's lots of competition. That means being like everyone else, wanting the things that everyone wants, focusing on what's out of your control like everyone else. It's a far better thing to focus on what is in your control, on being you and your unique self.

5:42Ryan Holiday: And the Stoics actually have a lot about this, right? Agrippinus, we talk about in Lives of the Stoics, he says, I want to be the red thread in the sweater, not like the other threads. I want to stand up. And that's the idea. Epictetus says, walk alone, right? Look around you, be who you are. To me, what he's saying is that when you try to be like someone else, you lose. When you want the things that other people want, you lose. When you enter something where you are trying to be like someone or something that you're not supposed to be, you lose. But when you are yourself, when you stand for what you stand for, when you do what you know is right, that's when you win even if you quote unquote lose there's an interview i was reading with the architect frank gary and he would he would say when he was talking to architects who were just starting out he'd get them to all get out a piece of paper and he would say write your signature on this paper and then he'd spread them out and have this the whole class looking up and I'd say, they all look different.

6:50Ryan Holiday: That's you. That's you. So stay with that forever. And I think that's what Epictetus is saying here. You are a unique person. You have a totally unique set of DNA and experiences and values, and you are that red thread. So don't make yourself like the others. Don't sell out, right? When you stick to who you are, when you're true to that, You win no matter what. You have a monopoly on you. Don't give that monopoly away. Don't forfeit it. Don't lose it. Another rendering of that Epictetus quote, he says, you can always win if you only enter competitions where winning is up to you. when your focus, as Mark Cirilli says, on what other people say or do, on getting approval, on having certain gatekeepers accept you or open things up to you, well, that's when you have set yourself up to be defeated.

7:45Ryan Holiday: And even if you win, you've still lost in some sense that you've given up something that was uniquely you and uniquely yours. I think that's a shame. And so that's what I want to leave you there. Stick with what's up to you. Stick with who you are. Go where you have that monopoly. Competition is for losers, as Peter Thiel said. So go where you're a winner.

8:13Kitchen and bathroom professionals know what goes behind the tile matters. That's why trade pros trust fiber cement, hardy backer board to keep tile firmly in place, resist cracking, and help block moisture. Chosen in over 40 million kitchens and bathrooms, Hardy Backer Board, what the best build on. Shop now at participating Home Depot, Lowe's, and Floor & Decor stores. For more information, visit jameshardy.com slash hardybacker.