Overcoming Adversity In Leadership Roles

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2:34Welcome 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.

3:16it's good to be here with all of you look i think it would be wonderful if everything went as planned and if life leadership and logistics and beating the market and running a business solving people's problems was easy, but it isn't. And certainly the last few years haven't been. I don't know how the pandemic affected all of your businesses. For me, it was interesting in the fall of 2019, my wife and I fell in love with this old building in a little town that we live in outside Austin, Texas. And we had an idea that was probably crazy under ordinary circumstances, and then turned out to be a really insane idea.

3:58We had this idea to open a small bookstore. And we began the process of opening that bookstore in February of 2020. Construction began the first week of March 2020. So it took a lot longer than expected. It costs a lot more than expected. And then, you know, you couldn't open. So it was fun, to say the least. Elon Musk has compared starting a business to eating glass and staring into the abyss of death. It was a lot like that. Yeah, it was a lot like that. Arrested development, they go, I think I've made a huge mistake. We certainly said that to ourselves many, many times. And I had to, of course, apply the lessons from my own book, which is this idea from the Stoics that we don't control what happens.

4:46We control how we respond to what happens, that we can find opportunities inside every obstacle. I wrote this little note to myself, staring out into a very full and at the same time, very empty bookstore with no timeline for opening. I said, 2020 is a test. We'll make you a better person or a worse one. And that's sort of what we're going to talk about today. How do you take the things that life throws at you and turn them into something? How do you become better for what you go through? Now, this bookstore ultimately did open and it's going great. My wife and I are still married, so I consider that a success.

5:23but it's been a really cool experience. And it was, again, a reminder that, you know, we have these plans, we have these ideas, this intention of how we'd like things to go. Then of course, life intervenes in both good ways and bad ways, right? So the pandemic was the first couple of years of this insane story. And then somewhere in the middle of it, when again, we're going, did we make a huge mistake? Elon Musk, who I mentioned earlier, comes along and opens a Tesla factory in the town that we're in, and it's no longer a small town. So it's been this cool experience. Again, you don't control what happens.

5:56You control how you respond to what happens. And if I can go back, give you sort of the penultimate example of this. I'll take you back about 2000 years, year 160 AD. A plague breaks out in Rome. It's a devastating pandemic. It originates in the far east of the empire. It's brought back by travelers and soldiers, quickly overwhelms Rome in all the capacities that we felt. COVID overwhelming us not too long ago. And it all falls on this guy, Marcus Aurelius. Unfortunately, they name it after him. It's called the Antonine Plague for his middle name. And actually, if the Antonine Plague was the only thing that Marcus dealt with, he probably would have counted himself lucky.

6:38There's a series of historic floods. Then Rome's borders are invaded. It's basically one thing after another for this guy. He keeps this diary. This is how we sort of know how he was affected by all these things he was going through. And in this diary, I'll get to it in a second. He writes, it's unfortunate that this happened. And it's sort of the understatement of the century. He kind of catches himself. He says, no, it's fortunate that this happened to me. But few actually saw it that way at the time. This is from a contemporary historian back then. They said, Marcus doesn't meet the good fortune that he deserves.

7:16this whole reign is involved in a series of troubles. Again, a bit of an understatement. It's one damn thing after another, one crisis after another. What can go wrong does go wrong. And then things that people didn't think could go wrong do go wrong. So this is what he's stuck with. And he's trying to practice the same thing I was telling you about. He's trying to dye the event with his own color, trying to see the opportunity inside this obstacle. He's trying to say, like, look, is this unfortunate or is this fortunate? Well, actually, we get to decide, right? An event is, and then we decide what it means to us.

7:50Shakespeare says, nothing, neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so. It's not making a moral judgment. He's saying events are, and then we determine what they mean, right? The market goes up or down. We call that a bear market or a full market, but the market just simply isn't. In fact, the market is not a thing either. This is a word we've come up with to describe something that's happening outside of us, right? So it's this idea that we get to decide what the events of our life mean to us, what the news that we've just gotten means to us. That's our choice. And so in meditations, Marcus says that, yes, our actions can be impeded.

8:27Certainly, this isn't what he wanted to be dealing with. He'd had 20 years of peace and prosperity before they hand him over the reins, and then everything goes sideways. But we can always accommodate and adapt and adjust. we can decide to do something different. We can decide to step up and meet this. We can decide this is an opportunity to do things we couldn't ordinarily do. So he sort of shortens that in meditations and he says the impediment to action advances action. It stands in the way, becomes the way. And so this is really the essence of stoicism. It's that in any and every situation, even if it's not the one that you wanted, even if it's not what you planned, even if it's not your fault, even if it's totally unfair, what it is nevertheless is an opportunity to step up and practice virtue or excellence, right?

9:12You can be excellent in any and all situations. It's not saying that, hey, this terrible calamity, this pandemic, this adverse business environment is wonderful and it's going to catapult your business further or forward. But it is an opportunity for you, nevertheless, to be great inside of those circumstances, right? And every year, every situation is effectively this choice. And for the Stoics, the way they get through that is really this three-part process. And it begins with kind of what we're just talking about, how we see it. It's obviously going to determine what we're going to be able to do about it.

9:50And so they call this the discipline of perception. So it's first the understanding that our perceptions carry with them an immense amount of power. How we see things determines what we're going to be able to do with them or not do with them. The Stoics say that, you know, it's not things that upset us. It's our opinion about things. Actually, I spoke to the Pittsburgh Pirates a few years ago. They had some version of this quote on the wall in the training facility. The idea is, right, we decide if this thing is frustrating or exciting. We decide if this is the worst thing ever or the best thing.

10:22We decide what it is. Our opinions determine whether it's frustrating or not, not the event itself, which is, of course, totally indifferent to us. So our first job, the Stokes would say, is what part of any situation is up to us and what is not up to us, right? There's all the things in the world, everything that's going on, and there's just this really small bit of it that we control that's up to us. And if we can take it that most people spend most of their time thinking about, feeling about, talking about, wishing about things that were not in their control, what they're doing is neglecting the small part of it that is in their control, right?

11:01Don't control what happens. control how we respond to what happens. Epictetus, one of the great stoics, would talk about how a skillful ball player doesn't say that's a good throw or a bad throw. They just catch it, and they throw it back. I love that 2 ,000 years ago, they're using sports metaphors. They've been with us forever. But this is effectively life, right? The throw is the throw, and we have to get where we need to get to catch it, right? And then we have to throw it back. This is our job. You catch it, catch it, you throw it. Sometimes we hit it. But the point is, it doesn't matter what labels we throw at it.

11:38This is not going to be constructive. What we should be doing is doing our actual job in response to what has happened. So Stoics would say that basically we control our thoughts, we control our emotions, we control our decisions, control how we choose to see things. That's basically it. In sports, we control how we play. We don't control what they say about us on SportsCenter. We don't control what the coach thinks. All we control is the little bit of playing time that we get, right? We control what we do, not what other people do, not what other people think. We control what we do. Now, I know there is this understanding of stoicism in the sort of modern parlance that means has no emotions, right?

12:19Stoic robot, the unfeeling animal, et cetera. This is not what stoicism is at all as far as philosophy goes. The Stoics were not emotionless, but they did try to be less emotional, particularly in high stress, high stakes situations. The idea was you strip the emotion out so you can see it as it is, right? That's less anger and fear, anxiety, greed, hate, despair, ego pride, right? The things that make hard situations harder. I have a little quote next to my desk from the choreographer Martha Graham. I look at it whenever I feel a little bit of imposter syndrome creeping on or what Stephen Pressfield would call the resistance.

12:58She says, never be afraid of material. Material knows when you are frightened and it will not help. And the point is, right, feeling insecure, feeling anxious, feeling not good enough, feeling frustrated, feeling behind. mind, right? Any of these emotions are taking away from what I should be doing in this moment, which is being present, looking at the screen in front of me, doing my job, right? So the Stoics isn't, again, emotionless, but they are trying to cultivate kind of an even keel, right? Not too high, not too low. This is what great athletes have to do, right? If you really feel it when you have a hitting streak, right, you're really going to feel it when you have a hitting slump, right?

13:38And you have to get used to understanding that it's not always going to go your way. There's going to be great moments and not so great moments. And you want to sort of cultivate in business and life and sports this even keel, right? You're sort of indifferent to when everyone's cheering for you and when everyone's booing you, as long as you know that you are doing what you are supposed to be doing in this situation. I got an amazing night's sleep last night. One, because my six-year-old fell asleep in the car at like six o 'clock and he transferred him from the car seat to the bed and it's stuck, which is just magic.

14:10So he's in bed way earlier than normal. But I sleep really well every night because I have a 8 Sleep Pod 5 Ultra, which is 8 Sleep's best product. I've used 8 Sleep for many years now and it's just totally transformed how I sleep, made me sleep better, made my wife sleep better. It's amazing. So basically 8 Sleep is this topper that goes over your mattress. It can heat and cool both sides separately. It can raise and lower each side separately. So it helps you fall asleep faster, stay asleep, and then wake up better. Eight Sleep buzzes me to wake gently every morning as opposed to some loud blaring alarm.

14:52And then I can check the app and it tells me my sleep score. It even helps me optimize my day based on how I slept. If you want to survive the holidays like a pro and just generally sleep better, Head over to 8sleep.com slash Daily Stoic and use code Daily Stoic to get$350 off your very own Pod 5 Ultra. The best part is you still get 30 days to try it at home and return it if you don't like it, but I know you will. Trust me, your body will thank you for this investment in better sleep, shipping to many countries worldwide. See details at 8sleep.com slash Daily Stoic. I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods.

15:33We get all our groceries for the week. Then we have dinner. It's one of their favorite things to do. It's one of my favorite things to do. And then my wife loves it because she doesn't have to take care of it. This holiday season, whether you're a guest or hosting the big dinner Whole Foods Market has what you need to delight everyone at your table. They even have heat and eat sides from the prepared foods department. You can make Whole Foods your one stop shop. Everything follows Whole Foods Market's strict ingredients standards. So you know it'll be delicious and good for you. You can also order online for pickup and even delivery in select zip codes to skip the crowds.

16:07Shop everything you need at Whole Foods Market to our holiday headquarters. Mark Sreelius talks about being like the rock that the waves crash over and eventually the sea falls still around. In Zen Buddhism, they talk about, you know, you take a cup with muddy water. If you let it sit long enough, right, the silt sinks to the bottom and eventually that water becomes clear. And so if we understand that stepping back, controlling our emotions a little bit, not reacting instantaneously or immediately, it allows us to see what's in front of us more clearly. This is General James Mattis, who actually carries a copy of Meditations with him everywhere he goes.

16:44He talked about how the big problem in the information age for leaders, for businesses, public figures, is that they're always reacting and reacting and reacting in an immediate setting. They're not stepping back and thinking. Think about the athletes that get themselves in trouble tweeting every emotion or thought they have. Brands doing the same thing. Right. I have never been glad after I lost my temper. Right. I have never been proud of the things that I winged off on social media. Right. The more I step back and think about what I have to say, what I think about the situation. Right. The better that decision is likely going to age.

17:22But I want to see this as a discipline. right? This idea of cultivating and controlling our emotions as a discipline. This is Toni Morrison. She would talk about how she needed to cultivate the morning, right? She'd get up very early. And in those mornings, she said she needed to make contact with the muses before she saw the sun. And then she said she needed to do her writing before she heard the word mom. And the idea being to cultivate a little bit of space, right? Again, instead of waking up in the morning and going straight into your phone, right? Straight into social media, straight into email, straight into the next thing, cultivating a little space.

18:01So I try to wake up very early. If you're not a morning person, there's a book recommendation I have for you. The idea being that a little discipline at night helps you be a little bit more disciplined in the morning. But the first thing I do when I wake up, again, instead of touching my phone, is I go for a walk, take my kids outside, push them in the stroller. Now they do that on their own. I have to bribe them now, which I feel no shame about. But the point is I get outside and I'm just thinking, I'm present, enjoying life, and I'm taking that energy back to the work that I do. This is my donkey.

18:37His name is Buddy. I bought him on Craigslist for$100. But going out, seeing the animals, again, helps me relax. And then I bring that back towards the stress and the tension that I have in my work life. Try to put the phone away. My rule is like no phone for the first 30 minutes to one hour that I'm awake, right? Don't get sucked into stuff. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day. He said, you know, I wake up in the morning, check my phone to see if there's any fires I have to put out. Then I go, you know, have some me time. It's like, but you never don't find the fires, right? You're always going to find them if you start the day looking for that.

19:12I try to do a little journaling in the morning. Again, like Marcus is doing a little bit of reflection, a little bit of space, intentionality, try to look at things, he says, in the calm, light, mild philosophy. So I want you to see this as a discipline because it is a discipline. It takes work. And then if you can do that work, it makes the decisions that you're going to have to make, that the future makes those decisions earlier. This is Harry Truman thrust into power in one of the most perilous moments in American history, really not even briefed for the job at all. In those first couple of months, he has to make some of the most momentous decisions in human history.

19:47And it's one thing after another. Famously, he has the sign on his desk, the buck stops here, right? Leaders have to make decisions. So they better be able to cultivate that perspective that we're talking about, that distance that we're talking about. They better have the discipline not to be emotional about things. Emotion is likely not going to help you with. But more interestingly, I think Truman has another sign on his desk. It gets a little bit less attention, but I think it's important for any brand in person. This is a quote from Mark Twain, and he had this inscribed there. It said, always do right.

20:21This will gratify some people and astonish the rest, right? So you have that distance so you can remind yourself of your personal and brand values, what's important to you, what the right thing is, not what everyone else is doing, not what is easier, not what you're the least amount of heat for, right? But what is right, right? And you step back and you have that time. And actually, Truman, talking about what he learned from Marx to realize his meditations, would say that the big values, the core virtues that we should base our decisions around, actually, I have them tattooed on my wrist here.

20:54He says, the greatest virtues are moderation, wisdom, justice, and fortitude. These are also rendered as courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, cultivate these. We refer back to these. They help us do the right thing in stressful and difficult moments. Then the other thing that I think helps us with this discipline when we're struggling, when we're overwhelmed, when we're dealing with one crisis after another, which the last few years have been, and certainly the future will promise us as well, is some preparation. We think about positive visualization. This is what a performance coach would deal with any athlete about, imagine it going well, vision yourself connecting with the ball, go through your practice swings, do all this.

21:40But the Stoics also practice negative visualization, premeditation of evils. Seneca says we have to rehearse all the possibilities in our mind. This is even exile and war and torture and chipwreck. Sadly, all these things do happen to Seneca, but he does sort of bear them with a certain amount of gravitas and dignity. The idea being that the unexpected blow lands heaviest. He says, the only inexcusable thing a leader can say is, I did not think that would happen, right? Or I didn't think it would happen to me, right? If it can happen, it can happen to you. And are you prepared for that? So the Stoics do a positive visualization.

22:21They do the postmortem after. They also do the premortem, right? What are the contingencies that I'm prepared for? What are the worst case scenarios? How am I prepared for an uncertain or difficult future? H-E-B, the grocery store chain in Texas, talks about this during the pandemic. They were like, you don't need to do a run on our store shelves. We're prepared for this, right? We've wargamed for a situation exactly like this. And so as businesses prepare and plan and expose themselves to stressful situations over and over again, doing stress tests, they're able to deal with real stress better.

22:56This is what astronauts do. This is what police officers do, firefighters, special forces operators, right? The Canadian astronaut, Chris Hadfield would say, astronauts are not braver than regular people. They're just more prepared than regular people. And in his first spacewalk, one of his eyes freezes shut. Then on the way back, the other eye freezes shut. And he talks about how in situations like that, there's a number of things you can do that will make the situation better. And then he said, it's worth remembering there's no problem so bad that you cannot make it worse also. And this is often what we do when we respond emotionally, when we don't take the time to step back, we don't have the solitude, when we don't have the discipline to see that, hey, me catastrophizing about this, me telling myself a story about this, it's not making the situation better.

23:45It's taking me away from the thing at hand, which I have to do something about. And that leads us to the next discipline, which, of course, is the discipline of action. It's not just enough to think about it. This isn't about manifesting or the law of attraction. You can't just wish good things to happen, and they happen. Conversely, this is why we shouldn't be that concerned about the consequences of negative visualization. You're not, like, tempting fate by thinking about the worst-case scenario. You're making it more likely you'll be able to deal with it. But the Stoics are saying that ultimately, you do have to take action, right?

24:18We don't control what happens. We control how we respond to what happens. We control what we do, right? This is the discipline of action. And the problem, though, what most people, what most brands, what most industries do, right? They know the threats that are coming. They know the possibilities. They know, right, how to solve this or dig themselves out of that. They don't actually do that stuff because it's hard, because they hope it'll magically go away, as they hope someone else will do it, right? Or they want to distract from having to do it by blaming other people or whatever it is, right?

24:51Ultimately, we have to do something about it, right? We do nothing. Seneca says the one thing all fools have in common is that they're always getting ready to start, right? We say, I'll do it tomorrow. We say, I will do it later. This is next quarter's problem or next year's problem. This is my successor's problem. No, if someone's going to do something about it, it should be you and it should be now. You could do it today, but instead you choose tomorrow and then you wonder why the problems stick around and why they're harder when you ultimately get around to them. It's an expression that dates all the way back to the 1700s.

25:27It's like, if you want to make sure that you experience nothing else unpleasant for the rest of the day, start the day by swallowing a live toad. You eat the frog in the morning. Everything else is pretty good from there. But what I take from that is you do the hard things first. For me, that's writing. Again, talking about the discipline of a day. I try to do the hard thing early in the day when I'm in a good space from the walk and the journaling and the family time. I go right into the hard thing, which is usually writing for me. If I say, oh, I'll do the writing later in the afternoon after I have this meeting, after I do this other thing.

26:03What I'm doing is setting myself up, my future self up to accept excuses later. So I do the hard thing. Now I do it first, I cross it off the list. If you're going to do it, do it is a Latin expression, which predates the Nike slogan by a couple of years. If you're going to do it, do it. Amelia Earhart, another great expression. She has this written on the side of her plane, always think with your stick forward, right? Assume in advance, intend on moving forward, not later, but now, right? And in your doing that, when you're facing obstacles or difficulties or uncertainty, right? What is the opportunity inherent in that, right?

26:47What is the opportunity to get creative, to do what you couldn't do under ordinary circumstances? What are other companies, other brands, other businesses afraid to do. When I sat down to open this bookstore, now, obviously, it wasn't a great environment to do it in. And, you know, frankly, this century is not a great time to open a bookstore. People don't read the way they used to. They can buy books easily on the internet. They can get it delivered via Audible, right? So we had to think about, given the constraints, given the reality of the market, where do we have an opportunity to do stuff that would stand out, be unique, be different.

27:27So the average bookstore with our footprint would have approximately 10 ,000 books in it. It seemed like a lot of work. It also seemed very expensive. My bookstore has 750 titles in it, right? So it's unlike pretty much any bookstore. And it's unlike pretty much any bookstore because I couldn't afford, nor did I have the bandwidth to be like every other bookstore. So we started very small, but all the books are face out. They stand out. And when people step into the bookstore, it feels very different than any other bookstore that they've been in. And now people come from all over the world to go to this bookstore.

28:03It's cool. It's unique. We did the things that, again, if we had an unlimited budget, if we had unlimited time, if we were in a different time and age, we wouldn't have considered doing because it would been easier to do it the way that everyone else does it. You can imagine when I went to my publisher, this was 2011, and I said, hey, I know I've just written a couple of these cool marketing books, but what I'd like to follow them up with is a series on an obscure school of ancient philosophy. They were not super excited. They said, what if we paid you half what we usually pay you? Does that sound good?

28:41And I had to say yes, right? Because I didn't have any other options. But what I, that forced me then to think about, we're talking about the obstacles in the way, is I had to do it very differently, right? How not having a classics background, not working at a university, right? Again, people not waking up and going, you know what I'd really love to read about is ancient philosophy. I had to find a way to make what I was really excited about palatable and accessible to other people. And that forced me to try a whole bunch of different creative things that I ordinarily wouldn't have done. And now it's worked out, right?

29:14The Obstacle's Away, I sold millions of copies. All the books have reached all different sorts of people. But I wouldn't have been able to do that without the constraints that are under me. During the financial crisis, Rahm Emanuel would tell Obama something like, you never let a crisis go to waste, right? It's an opportunity to do things that you could not do before. So what in the situation you're in, in the environment that we're going into, right? What could you do that under ordinary circumstances you couldn't do? And we saw this during the pandemic, right? Work from home, not possible before, suddenly becomes possible because we have no choice, right?

29:48Businesses that were solely in person that required you to go to a specific place at a specific time to do stuff suddenly had e-commerce operations or five-year plans became five-week plans, right? People were able to speed things up and do things that ordinarily they wouldn't be able to do. And so as you face difficulty and uncertainty and frustrating situations, you cheer yourself up, you find the opportunity to do the things that you couldn't ordinarily do. Because every position does have its advantages, if we choose to see them, right, to think about the things that people are not thinking about, to try what they're afraid to try.

30:27And if we can be dedicated, disciplined, and committed enough to find a way where others don't seem to see one. Or even better, we can make one. Edison credited with inventing the light bulb. That's actually not what he did. Also credited with the expression, an idea is 1 % inspiration, 99 % perspiration. Actually, what a light bulb was going to be was pretty well established around the time Edison enters the game. They knew it would be a vacuum sealed bulb. They knew a filament would run through the bulb. Electricity would run through the filament, illuminate the bulb. What Edison did was not discover any of that.

31:10Edison discovered was how that would work. Edison doesn't try 100 different filaments. Edison tries 6 ,000 different filaments over several years and ultimately finds the one that is commercially viable. He dispatches agents all over the world. At one point in desperation he tries hair from his own beard. He's willing to try anything and everything. He has extremely high standards for what he wants a light bulb to be. But Edison's genius there was his persistence, his endurance, crossing off all the things that didn't work until he eventually found the one that did. So he tries one thing after another.

31:51And then when he solves that problem, I hate to break it to you, we think get through the hard times, get through the obstacle. What's on the other side of that? More obstacles. Now we had to figure out how do you deliver electricity to people, right? Which he then had to figure out. He delivers electricity to a block in New York City, right? What Edison was, what was great about Edison, he was a problem solver. Tesla, almost certainly a better inventor than Edison, said if you asked Edison how to find a needle in a haystack, he would lay the haystack down and go through it piece of straw by piece of straw until he found the needle.

32:25Now, that's not super sexy. It'd be great if you came up with a magical invention that did it. But that is a way to find a needle in a haystack, which Edison does time and time again. Nick Saban calls this the process, right? You don't think about the end result. You don't get too far out over your skis. What is your job in this moment, you do that job. When I was writing my last book, Discipline is Destiny, I started, sat down and suddenly like the book didn't really seem like it was there. I was really struggling with it. I started to go through my note cards. I read all my books through his note cards and I found this note card that I wrote to myself.

32:59I don't know when, I don't know why, but many months previous, I'd written a note to myself that said, trust the process, go through your note cards, note card by note card, and eventually a book will emerge, which is what happened. I showed up to work every single day, tried to follow my routine, chipped away at it. There was no magical moment where the book revealed itself or wrote itself. But I went through my note cards, which became the building blocks of each page. And I showed up, I tried to make a positive contribution each day. There's a writing rule that I love. It says two crappy pages a day.

33:32That's all you need. Just do a couple of crappy pages a day. And it adds up to a manuscript, not a publishable manuscript, but an editable manuscript, right? Something you can publish. So you show up every day, you chip away at it, and you make your progress, right? And that's what I did. The other thing I try to do as part of my sort of discipline of action, is I try to do something really hard every day that gives me a win, right? So I swim every day. That's my goat there on the fence. I swim every day or I run every day. I go in a cold plunge every day. I do these things because they are hard.

34:08They are in my control and they help me feel like I'm winning. So even if the book is not going well, right, I know that I'm challenging myself. I know I'm getting stronger or faster, but I'm able to endure a little bit longer, giving myself a win every single day. Seneca says we treat the body rigorously so that it's not disobedient to the mind. I tell myself to go for a run, go for the run. I always come back, right? It's magical. I never just stop halfway and then I live there now, right? I always come back. And so I remind myself that when I start things, I have the willpower and the strength to finish them.

34:44I have a routine that practices, that builds that muscle every single day. Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns.

35:21There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course, because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour.

35:58And of course, this is stoicism too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. Well, it's almost here. Christmas is just a couple of days away and maybe you're scrambling. You're like, what should I get my dad? What should I get my mom? I got to get something to my sister. People love showing off pictures of their kids and that's where today's sponsor comes in.

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37:45Don't get too far out over this, this, this, this, this. Just focus on the next thing we have to do. This is a guy named Richard Overton. He was my neighbor in Austin, Texas. He was the world's oldest man when he died at 112. And I remember I asked him one time, I said, Richard, what's the secret to living that long? I said, do you take it day by day? And he said, at my age, you take it day by night. And again, I try not to get too far ahead of myself. I just survive the next thing, get through the next thing. It adds up. This is the La Sangrada Familia, set to be finished in 2026, which will be the 100th anniversary of the architect's death.

38:25So it's a little behind schedule. They also just got fined by the EU because they've been building without permits the entire time. But look, it's amazing. It's beautiful. It takes what it takes, right? It takes how long it's going to take. As long as you stay at it, as long as you don't quit, eventually you come back around and you get where you want to go. One of the ways to do that, I would argue, is that you've got to say this magic word. You have to say no. This is an action, I would say. It's a hard action. It requires an immense amount of discipline. You have to say no. Jonathan Fader, Dr.

39:03Jonathan Fader is a sports psychologist. He's worked with the Major League Baseball for many, many years. He actually sent me this. He sent me this picture. That's Dr. Oliver Sacks, who has behind him a large sign that just says no. And his point was, you have to learn how to say no. No is everything. He was talking to me. He said, look, when batters come into the league, right, they got where they got because they're really good at swinging at pitches, right? There's an expression, I think it's in the Dominican, something like, you don't walk off the island, meaning you make your name, you make your reputation in baseball by swinging at pitches.

39:43You can't hit what you don't swing at. And yet, as soon as you make it into the league, it becomes about actually something much more difficult, which is swing discipline or pitch discipline. recognizing which pitches you swing at and which ones are pretty good, really good, close enough, right, that you don't swing at. You have to have the restraint to not swing at pitches. You have to have the ability to say no. So I actually have this picture between two pictures of my kids to remind myself that I have to say no so I can say yes to these two other people, right? I have another little memo. This is a memo from Truman's office that I got from a collector, and it says, Should we say that because of too many requests, the president must ask to be excused?

40:31And Truman underlines this, and he says, the proper response is underlined. He assigns Arius Truman. He was telling his team, look, now that I'm president, I have to say no to the vast majority of requests that come in so I can do my job, so I can focus on these really difficult decisions that I have to make. For instance, this is an ideal day in my calendar. Nothing scheduled. It's not that I'm not working, it's that I haven't scheduled in a bunch of distractions. Oh, can I pick your brain? Do you want to get coffee? Should we all meet? No, we probably shouldn't. We should work instead. The point is, I have to say no to a lot.

41:09I get a lot of requests, I have to say no to a lot. Or I can't do the thing that only I can do, which is write the books that I have to write. This is E.B. White at Charlotte's Web. He's asked to be on a presidential commission. Again, pretty prestigious, pretty exciting, pretty fun. I must decline, he says, for secret reasons. I love that, right? No is a complete sentence. I've heard it said. I love that. Don't make excuses. When you say, I can't because X, Y, and Z, what you're actually saying is, please argue with me about why I actually can, right? You're saying, let's work together to figure out how I can do this.

41:44Really, you're saying, I don't want to. I shouldn't have to. I've got more important stuff to do. You have to be able to say no. Because by saying no, you are saying yes. Conversely, when you are saying yes to things that you shouldn't be saying yes to, you're saying no to the things that matter. It's one of my favorite tweets of all time. Could the meeting be a Zoom? Could the Zoom be a phone call? Could the phone call be an email? Could the email be a text? Could the text be nothing? Yes, it could probably be nothing. you have to be able to say no to these things, right? You have to ask, as Mark's really said, is this essential, right?

42:20He says when you eliminate the inessential, you get the double benefit of doing the essential things better. I talked to the Los Angeles Rams a couple years ago, and their motto is the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing, right? What's the main thing? What's the thing that only you can do? What's most important? What is your business really focused on, right? What is your main job? Do that thing. Ignore the other things so you can do that main thing well, right? And I'm just talking about this professionally, right? We say, I'm doing this for my family, family that I never see, right?

42:55I'm saying I'm doing this for them. Are you really? Are you doing it for you? Or are you just doing it because somebody else asked you and you don't have the discipline or the confidence to say, I'm sorry, it's outside my purview. Sorry, I don't have time for that. Or just no. So that leads to the final and I think most essential discipline here, which would be the discipline of the will, sort of endurance and strength and fortitude needed to survive, to endure, to be great. Lou Gehrig, longest streak in baseball for almost half a century, 2 ,000 plus games. It wasn't like just everything went his way, that he never got hurt, he was never injured.

43:36No, it was a grueling battle. This was when the baseball season was longer, when they would often play multiple doubleheaders in the same week, when they traveled between games by bus and train, when they barnstormed in the offseason. It was a grueling game. And they actually found after he retired that he had broken every single bone in his hands multiple times, right? So it wasn't fun. It wasn't easy, right? But he pushes through this. He cultivates this sort of immense willpower and strength. I think it's very impressive, of course, one of the great baseball players of all time. But I would argue that Gerard's streak is nothing compared to this lady's streak.

44:22She basically shows up for work every day without a day off for 70 years. Her job primarily is to say no to things, to not change, to not get involved. Her job is to not have opinions about things. And she does this remarkably every single day for seven decades. Never does she give an on-the-record interview to a journalist, even though she was often gossiped about and criticized. She would have had so many things that she wanted to talk about. That's not the job. That's not her role. She sort of shows up and does this every single day. It culminates, I think, in a tragic but beautiful moment.

45:01She loses her husband in the middle of the pandemic. They would have made unlimited exceptions for this lady. And yet she grieves alone in a box at the funeral because she doesn't want any exemption from what they were calling then the protocols, right? Her whole life is about protocols, not because of the pandemic, but royal protocol. What am I supposed to do in this situation? What am I not supposed to do in this situation? I'm sticking with that. That's my job. I'm at it as long as it takes. And by the way, you have to have this job till you die. And she does this. And it's amazing and beautiful.

45:33I think even more poignant and inspiring to consider now that we know what other members of the government were doing during the pandemic, which was throwing parties and exempting themselves from the rules, right? That's not what she was doing. Mark Cerullus talks about loving the discipline you know and letting it support you, even in these really painful and difficult moments. This is Dr. Catalan Carrico. She came to America in the 1980s. She escapes communism in Hungary. She and her husband and their young daughter make it here with$900. It's stuffed in her daughter's teddy bear. She works for the University of Pennsylvania, basically an obscure academic in the bowels of academia.

46:12She is forced to reapply for her job every year. She never makes more than 60 grand. People are constantly doubting her research, doubting her intelligence, right, doubting whether she's a good fit. And she just sort of tirelessly works away on this obscure form of obscure domain of research that would become the mRNA vaccine, which suddenly people became very interested in a couple years ago. This would all be topped off. She's snubbed for a Nobel Prize. But there was a New York Times profile of her and her family and her husband who gets a job like managing apartment complexes so they can cover the bills.

46:51You know, he says, I don't want you to feel sorry for my wife. She loves coming to work every day, right? She knew what she was supposed to do. She loved the discipline. She stuck with it and eventually ends up changing the world, right? And that requires a lot of courage. It requires discipline. It requires endurance, right? This is Shackleton's famous family motto, by endurance we conquer, by sticking at it, right? We don't control what happens. We control how we respond, right? We do control. We don't control how lucrative the niche is or what the market will do or what office we get called to fill, whether things are hard or easy.

47:26We do control whether we give up, right? We control whether we quit. We control whether we get back up. We control whether we keep going. This is Edison's factory. You may notice that it is on fire. So he's sitting down for dinner with his family. He's America's most successful inventor. A man rushes in. Your factory is on fire. Your life's work is going up in flames. Edison goes to the scene and he finds his son. His son is standing there shell-shocked, right? They're watching it all burn. It's only partially insured. A big mistake. But he finds his son and he grabs him and he says, go get your mother and all her friends.

48:02They'll never see a fire like this again. And I love that. He recites a line from Kipling's famous poem about treating triumph and disaster all the same. He tells reporters the next day, I've been through things like this before, prevents an old man from getting bored. And that's what he does. He takes a million dollar loan from Henry Ford, rebuilds the factory in six weeks. It's partially back up and running in six months. It's fully operational. The final act of Edison's life is rebuilding from this tragedy, which was not his fault, which he would not have chosen, right? But he keeps going, he sticks with it, doesn't give up.

48:38And he draws on the experience he's had in the past. It's what guides him in the future, right? We should take that from COVID. We all survived literally and figuratively, right? The future should not intimidate us too much. Probably hard for it to get worse than some of those early days, right? It's unlikely that, you know, we will experience similar shocks that profound, right? At least for a little while, one would hope. We should be prepared, but I think we can rest somewhat comfortably there. The point is we can now draw on the fact that we've been through a historical event of epic proportions.

49:12We would ask our grandparents or great-grandparents what it was like to live through the Depression or World War II. We went through something that in 50 or 60 years will seem incomprehensible to people. We made it, right? The business survived. We survived. And we should know, what we should take from that is a sense of our own capabilities. We have been tested and we've passed. Stokes would talk about this idea of amor fati, which means a love of faith, right? You embrace it. You don't just bear it, but you embrace it. Marx really says that what you throw on a fire becomes fuel for the fire.

49:45And we did. We not only got through, but we did things that we couldn't do under ordinary circumstances. We learned things we wouldn't learn in ordinary circumstances. And this won't be easy, right, to keep going. We will relapse and make mistakes. We'll lose track of the prize, right? But we can, as Marcus says, celebrate behaving like a human being, pick ourselves back up when we fail. We can keep going. We can love that discipline and let it support us. So I wish I could give you a more cheerful message about how there's only better days ahead. But I would actually argue that it's good news that things will be difficult, that things will be hard, that they have been difficult.

50:25They have been hard. It's good news because it's the opportunity, right? It's the opportunity to step up, to grow, to learn, to change, to do things we couldn't ordinarily do. And I gave you that quote about Marcus earlier from that ancient historian who said that Marcus didn't have the good fortune that he deserves as his whole reign is involved in a series of troubles. But that's not the full quote. He wasn't just lamenting how unfair things had been. He was saying that for his part, he admires Marcus all the more because of what he went through. He said, amid unusual and extraordinary difficulties, he both survived himself and preserved the empire.

51:00Marcus Aurelius is great, not in spite of what he went through, but because of what he went through. Because he saw that the impediment to action could advance the action, that what stands in the way is the way that any situation, no matter how bad or undesirable, it is an opportunity to practice excellence. And so I will leave you with one more thought, which is this idea that life is brief, right? COVID teaches us that also, right? Life is unexpected. Life is uncertain. So it's actually meditate on this fact, right? Instead of denying, instead of pushing it away, instead of only thinking good thoughts, they go, yeah, we are all going to die and we don't know when.

51:37They say you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think, right? Instead of resenting or fighting it, embrace it, Let that give you some urgency. Let it give you some perspective. Let it give you some purpose. Focus on what truly matters. Don't get caught up in the things that don't matter. Seneca says, just in the way that you balance the books of your business, he says, you should balance the books of life. Postpone nothing. Delay nothing. Realize, as Seneca says, that death isn't this thing way off in the distance, but it's something that happens now. And the time that passes, the Stokes would say, is as good as dead.

52:16So how are you spending that time? How are you designing your life? What are you working on? Is it something you're proud of and something that's important? Are you giving this moment that you're in, this moment that you're lucky to have? Are you giving it all that you have? Are you doing your best? Are you making a positive difference in your industry, positive difference for the people around you? Are you building something that matters? Is this the legacy that you want to live? Memento mori and that very somber, morbid thought. I'm excited to kick some questions around with all of you. So thank you very much.

52:59Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized. You can get them sent to a friend. The obstacle is the way. You go as the enemy. Stillness is the key. The leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoic. We have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.

53:28My family owns a 2023 Toyota 4Runner, and honestly, it's my favorite vehicle that I've ever owned. Around town, it's smooth and reliable, but where it really shines is on our trips into the backcountry. We've taken it on backpacking adventures to Colorado and New Mexico, loaded it up with gear, and never had to think twice about whether it could handle the terrain. That's what Toyota trucks are built for. Off-road confidence, rugged durability, and the freedom to explore. Toyota has a long history with the outdoor community, and they're committed to helping more people get out there and experience what nature has to offer.

53:57From remote trails to scenic byways, Toyota Trucks empowers you to take the detour, roam freely, and discover places that still feel wild and untouched. And they're not just making great trucks, they're working to expand access to adventure so more people can connect with the outdoors and pass that passion on to the next generation. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. That's toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. Shopify's point of sale system helps you sell at every stage of your business. Need a fast and secure way to take payments in person?

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