Ryan Speaks To The YMCA About Courage, Perseverance, And Showing Up Every Day

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2:38Welcome 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.

3:20Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Back in October of 22, I was asked to speak to the Pennsylvania YMCA. They had a group of their leaders come together. This was a remote gathering. I didn't make my way out there, although I love YMCA. There's a great one here in Austin, right on Town Lake that I like to swim in. My wife used to play volleyball at a bunch of different YMCA, and I'd go and work out or swim in the pools. So I'm a big fan of athletic clubs and cool places to swim or work out. And so I've always been a YMCA guy. And they wanted me to talk about the ideas in Courage is Calling.

4:05They'd lost something like 60 to 70 % of their memberships during the pandemic. And there was problems in major cities and changes and people built gyms in their house, people started indulging in bad habits. And they've been trying to, across the state of Pennsylvania, rebuild, rethink, regroup. And they wanted me to come out. And so I had a nice chat about some of the ideas in Courage is Calling, what the Stokes could teach a great organization like that. There's about 58 different YMCAs across the state of Pennsylvania. And so they had a bunch of their executives and leaders, young and old, come together.

4:49And these are a bunch of the future leaders, the next generation of YMCA. So it was a really cool opportunity to come in and do that. I'm talking about so many of the stoic ideas we talk about here, starting small, following the process, not letting fear or anxiety or the magnitude of the problem overwhelm us. I talk about showing up every day, being brave enough to see the positive in the moment, how the obstacle is the way. And so I thought I'd bring you this talk. It's obviously been a little while, so I let the ideas seep in over there. The YMCA, I'm grateful for them to invite me. And now I wanted to share it with a wider audience, so I'm bringing it here to the podcast.

5:31I hope you like it. And I do the occasional virtual talk still. It's obviously cooler and better to be there in person, although there's something awesome about the scale that these virtual talks let you do, because I can do a couple in a day. You don't have to travel, all that. So you can email VaynerSpeakers if you've got an organization you want me to talk to. But in the meantime, here's me talking courage and stoicism to the YMCA. And now to you.

6:01You probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits. This is having a profound impact on the world's poorest people and the world's poorest communities. But, you know, just hearing about that, that's not what stoicism is about. Stoicism is, to me, what you're going to do about it. And that's where GiveWell comes in. GiveWell is trusted by tens of thousands of donors each year because they provide free and independent research that helps you understand how to have a big impact. GiveWell has spent the last 18 years researching global health and poverty alleviation, and they direct funding to the highest impact opportunities.

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7:16To claim your match, go to GiveWell.org and pick Daily Stoic from the drop-down menu under podcast. That's how they know that you heard about GiveWell from The Daily Stoic, and you'll get your donation matched. That's GiveWell.org. Code The Daily Stoic to donate or find out more.

7:35Thank you for having me. It's great to be with you. I am coming to you from the Los Angeles Athletic Club in downtown Los Angeles. I am I'm here with my family. I just did a little talk in San Diego. A longtime member swimmer at the YMCA there on Town Lake in Austin. So I love what you guys do. And so it's an honor to be with all of you. If I could take you way back about 2000 years to a time in which the gymnasia was still a very familiar and popular concept, the Roman people experienced a devastating plague. It comes from the Far East. It's brought back by returning soldiers. It quickly overwhelms Rome's institutions.

8:24it's known as the Antonine Plague. And it's named after a guy named Marcus Aurelius, who happens to be the emperor of Rome at this time. The plague is not his fault, but it's still his problem to deal with. Among many other problems, there's historic flooding, there's a coup attempt. Most of his reign is spent dealing with various wars or invasions. It's sort of one thing after another for this guy. Basically, everything that could go wrong, does, as I'm sure many of you can relate to these days. And Marcus keeps a journal, sort of a diary called Meditations, which just translates to to himself in Greek.

9:06So he'd write these notes to himself as he was dealing with the difficulties that life seems to be doling out one after another. And at one point in Meditations, he says, you know, it's unfortunate that this happened. And in fact, an ancient historian agrees. He says that this is, again, almost 2 ,000 years ago. He says, you know, Marcus does not meet with the good fortune that he deserved for his whole reign was involved in a series of troubles. Again, this sort of reminds me of how things have been the last few years, just one thing after another. But Marcus tries to catch himself. He writes in meditations, you know, is it unfortunate that this happened to me or is it fortunate that this happened to me?

9:53He's basically saying that we have a choice how we choose to see things. The last couple of years for me, I don't know what your pandemic story has been like, I can imagine. But in February of 2020, I was in the middle of opening a small bookstore in rural Texas, which was probably crazy under ordinary circumstances. And then, you know, turned out to be a lot like that line in Arrested Development. I think I've made a huge mistake. It cost more than expected. It took longer than expected. And then when we could open, we weren't sure that we wanted to, you know, in the middle of this pandemic. And I caught myself at one point, I wrote a note to myself sort of thinking about this exact sort of dilemma that Marcus goes through.

10:36And Marcus writes to himself about, you know, this choice. And so I wrote to myself as I stared out over this empty bookstore with no customers that I'd sunk my life savings into. And I said, 2020 is a choice. Will it make you a better person or a worse one? And to me, this is kind of the essence of stoicism. When I wrote my book, The Obstacles Away, it was sort of centered around this idea that we have the ability to see these things that life puts in front of us as a challenge. That's what the stoics believed, that although we don't choose what happens, we choose how we respond to what happens.

11:11We choose to see the opportunity inside the obstacle. We see the challenge that we can rise to meet. So today I wanted to talk sort of specifically about this idea of courage, the courage necessary to face what life has dealt us, to face the economic environment, the cultural environment, the political environment, the public health environment that we are in, and to not just not be deterred by it, but to see the opportunities within it to be made better for the challenge that we happen to be facing. And I think for the Stoics, the first idea is that what we're doing is hard enough. Fear doesn't help.

11:56People think that the word Stoic means has no emotions, right? That's the lowercase meaning of stoicism in the English language. That's really not what stoicism was in the ancient world. That's not what the philosophy of stoicism is about. To me, the philosophy of stoicism is about the absence of destructive emotions or the processing of destructive emotions before they take a situation and make it worse. Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut, he talks about how in space, something happens. right here in some crisis, and in his first spacewalk, one of his eyes literally freezes shut. He can't see.

12:38It's a life or death situation. He says, you know, there's a number of things you can do in any situation that will make it better, right? And he said, but it's worth remembering that there's no problem so bad that we can't make it worse also, which is so often what we do when we're afraid. Most Americans are familiar with FDR's famous speech, right, at the outset of the Great Depression when he's inaugurated, he says, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. We actually think about this. This isn't an abstract argument that he's making about fear in general. He's talking about people making runs on banks, people checking out of investments, people pulling money out of the stock market, right?

13:20People, the economy requires buy-in, it requires engagement. He's talking about how in an economic panic, when people have lost faith in institutions and government. Fear is a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? It's a downward spiral. And what he's trying to do in this moment is go, look, it's really bad. I'm not lying. I'm not going to lie and say that it isn't. But fear isn't helping here. Fear takes a bad situation and makes it worse, right? Panic doesn't help. Anxiety doesn't help. Feeling sorry for ourselves doesn't help. Feeling jealous doesn't help. Feeling guilty or full of regret doesn't help.

14:06The essence of stoicism is this idea that there's things that are up to us and things that are not up to us. And a lot of the emotions that we feel that we bring to bear on the situations or the obstacles that are in front of us are not constructive. They're emoting at the parts of things that are outside of our control. But courage, the belief that one can do something, that there's room to do something, that something is salvageable, these are constructive, positive emotions that allow us to move forward, right? I'm not saying that just because you believe you can do something, you can do it.

14:44But certainly, if you don't believe that you can do something, if you believe a situation is hopeless, that you are helpless, that you have no agency over the situation that it's a done deal, it's broken, things will never come back, things can never be improved. Well, then, you know, that is true. So for the Stoics, then it's the first step is get control of myself, not going to freak out, not going to get angry, I'm not going to make this worse. And then the next stage for the Stoics, I think, is actually a pretty small step. It's about starting small. I think sometimes we look at the enormity of the situation we have to claw our way back through the hole we have to dig ourselves out of, the things that we have to repair, the business that we have to bring back, and we despair.

15:35And despair is also not a particularly productive emotion. As I was starting my last book, Discipline is Destiny, I had this sort of dark night of the soul moment, a moment of despair. I was on roughly my 10th book in 10 years. I was exhausted. I wasn't sure that I had the material. I wasn't sure I could pull off the material. It just wasn't there. I was starting this book in the midsummer. And as I sort of looked at the material, I had this moment where I thought, you know what, it would probably make sense to just call my publisher here and ask for a pretty significant delay or just call it off altogether.

16:20And it's funny, as I was sitting there, it was actually on my birthday, I just started flipping through the note cards that I'd assembled. I write all my books on these sort of four by six note cards, all my research. And I was going through these note cards and I found this note card written in red Sharpie. And I don't know when I wrote it and I don't know why I wrote it, but what I'd written however long before. It said, look, when you sit down to go through these note cards, it's going to feel like there isn't a book here. But if you show up every day, if you follow the process, eventually the book will emerge.

16:54Just follow the process. And I don't know why I sent this message from the past to my future self, but it happened to be exactly what I needed in that moment. It wasn't a note card that said, here is the way forward. Here is the magical solution to all of your problems. Here is a singular idea that will do everything. Epiphanies are overrated. I tend to find that they don't exist. But what was there in that note card was a reminder of the idea of the process, right? The Stoics say that we solve our problems action by action. Marx realises no one can stop you from that. Doing the little task in front of you, the first thing in front of you, right?

17:32No one can stop you from that. It's actually funny. The book didn't magically appear. It took weeks before I started to get some confidence back before I could see where I was going. But I did show up every day and I just started going through these note cards. And I got a little bit here and a little bit there. And eventually patterns started to emerge and the book made itself clear. And it was funny, about 18 months later, as the book was about to come out, I was staring at a thing I'd massively overcommitted to. I agreed to sign about 15 ,000 copies for the pre-order of the launch. And as I had to fly to Chicago to a warehouse, all the books were laid out in this enormous warehouse.

18:14And as I stared out over 15 ,000 books that I had to individually sign one by one, dreading what my hand would feel like at the end, I sort of questioned how this was going to be physically possible and how this would be possible in the relatively short amount of time that I had. And then it was sort of that same idea, again, right? The way to sign 15 ,000 books is by signing them one book at a time, right? This is how we solve all problems. Nikola Tesla once sort of sneeringly said of Edison that if you asked Edison to find a needle in a haystack, he would lay the haystack down and go through a piece of straw by piece of straw till he found the needle.

19:00And I think Tesla was saying that, you know, A smarter person would just come up with some magical invention that would find the needle in the haystack. But going through a piece of straw by piece of straw is one way to do it, and it's probably the tried and the truest way to do it. And when Edison, who's credited with inventing the light bulb, does invent this, he does it not by understanding the technology of how it would work. This is pretty established science at this time. Edison discovers what the filament inside the light bulb will be. And he doesn't test 100. You know, it supposedly says 1 % inspiration, 99 % perspiration.

19:44He tests 6 ,000 different filaments. We solve our problems one by one, testing assumption, hypotheses, one after another, crossing things off, chipping away at it, following the process. And I love this from the Stokes. They're saying, don't despair at the immensity of what lays before you. Don't let the crush of life overwhelm you as a whole, Mark Sturillos is saying. And you can imagine, as he looked out after one problem after another, no end in sight, the idea of how can I possibly go forward from this? What could I possibly do? The idea of just do the thing in front of you, chip away at this is really humble, but it's ultimately the only way forward.

20:30Zeno, one of the founders of stoicism, who loses everything in a shipwreck and sort of washes up on shore in Athens, staring at the prospect of a totally new life. He says, well-being is realized by small steps, but it is no small thing. And that's what we have to realize, that these little bits of progress, hiring one person, solving one problem, moving the ball forward one little bit, right? Bringing one customer back, re-signing one member, renegotiating one lease, right? Solving one thing after another. It doesn't seem like a lot, just like going through each note card, signing one individual book.

21:15It doesn't feel like much, but cumulatively, it becomes what we need. And indeed, it's the only way to get back to where we want to go.

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22:41I want to actually pick up that thread there, this idea of getting back to where things were, because I think one of the few things that I have heard more in the pandemic that has bothered me most has been this idea of when things go back to normal, right? Can't wait for things to go back to normal. And people have been saying this since March of 2020, right? It'll be two weeks, It'll be two months. Oh, two years, everything will be back to normal. First off, normal doesn't exist. But second, normal is what caused the situation that we're in, right? Normal is why we were unprepared for it. Normal is all of the things that set us up to be in the position that we were.

23:29And so for the Stoics, it's understanding, it's having the courage to understand that normal doesn't exist. And in fact, the only normal thing in the world is the kind of disruptive, destabilizing, uncomfortable, challenging change that we've just went through, right? People say, oh, this is unprecedented. The Stoics, again, Mark Sturilius, a plague, civil unrest, war, problems at the border. he'd say, this is very precedented. This is the most precedented thing that there is. And it's only our illusions about how things should be and how we want them to be that catch us off guard when they stop being that way or they radically change.

24:15And so a Stoic says that the reason we train, the reason we embrace change is so that when it does happen, it doesn't catch us off guard. Seneca famously says that the unexpected blow lands heaviest. And his point was that we actually have to meditate on plan for the unexpected events of life. So when Chris Hadfield is saying there's things that you can do to make it better, there's things you can do to make it worse, what he's talking about is the kind of training that an astronaut goes through, the kind of preparation so that in high stress fluid situations, one can adapt and adjust and knows what to revert to.

25:00Obviously, looking at the last couple of years, we're all sitting back and going, okay, well, what would we do differently? What mistakes did we make? We're kind of debriefing, trying to do a postmortem on what happened. And postmortems are great. They're a wonderful way to learn. But the Stoics would say that a premortem is far superior, right? Planning in advance for what can go wrong, being willing to consider the worst case scenario, having wargaming, the kinds of scenarios where membership drops by half. We have to be closed. We have to explore virtual or e-commerce elements. When I do talks, I think about, okay, what's my plan if there are significant technical difficulties?

25:42What if I've been given the brief about the audience, right? What backup plans do I have? What backup plans do I have for my backup plans? How have I practiced and set myself up so that when things are not the way that I want them to be, I am not at a loss? The whole purpose of stoic philosophy, Epictetus says, is that when things happen in life, we can be able to say, ah, this is what I trained for, right? This is why they pay me the big bucks. This is why I am in a position of leadership. It's for these kinds of things. It's not for when things are going well. It's not for when things are happening the way I want them to happen.

26:23It's when they get tough, when they get difficult, when they are destabilized. That's when we come in. That's when we do our work. Now, when we talk about this kind of idea You have the stoic that embraces change, the kind of stoic that always focuses on what they can do, the kind of stoic that isn't afraid. I don't want you, though, to, again, revert to this stereotype as the unfeeling, invulnerable robotic stoic, right? The last couple of years have been incredibly difficult, incredibly challenging. They forced us to question so many things. They've taxed us and overtaxed us and burnt us out in so many ways.

27:04And the stoic is fine admitting this, acknowledging this. They're brave enough to admit and address where they are struggling, where they are having a hard time. I think you might say that the bravest thing in the world, certainly Brene Brown talks about this in her books, one of the bravest things in the world to do is to be vulnerable, to ask for help. Marcus Aurelius says, look, we are like soldiers storming a wall. If you fall and slip and you have to ask a comrade to help lift you up, to extend your arm, to pull you up over the wall, he says, so what? Right? And I love this idea of so what, right?

27:47When your friends ask you for help, when your coworkers ask you for help, when people on your team say, oh, I don't understand. Can you explain that to me again? You're never like, what an idiot. How dare you? Right. You're you're glad you asked. You'd much rather someone ask for more instruction than do the thing improperly or admit far too late in the process that they don't know what's going on. If you remember that that scene in the office where Jim is asked to do a rundown, but he has no idea what a rundown is. And instead of just saying, hey, I don't know what a rundown is, he just wastes weeks of everyone's time dancing around it.

28:26Right. We actually don't mind when people ask for help. And then we turn around and refuse to ask for help, refuse to acknowledge when we're struggling, when we're having a hard time, when we don't understand something, when we don't know something. And then and then we we wonder why we don't get better, why why why the team struggles. And then, of course, we wonder why the other people in the organization also are afraid to ask for help. Well, we're modeling the wrong behavior. We're not being brave enough to ask for help. One of my favorite quotes from the Stoics is, it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know, right?

29:05If you think you know the answer to everything, if you're too afraid to ask things, you won't get any better. But I think this is also true for help. You don't get help you don't ask for. You don't learn things that you're too closed off for. And so you have to be brave enough to be vulnerable. You have to ask for support. You have to ask for resources. is most of the people who are above you or have been there longer, they've been through stuff like this before. And you have to be brave enough to ask for this. There's a book I like to read my kids called The Boy, the Fox, the Horse, and the Mole.

29:35It's a credible, beautifully illustrated little book. There's a line in it where the horse says, asking for help isn't giving up, it's refusing to give up. And I think this so perfectly expresses why the courage to be vulnerable and ask for help is so important. The person who says, I just don't understand, it's impossible, I can't do it, is the kind of person who's frozen in place, who is stuck. The person who's willing, brave enough to ask for help to say, hey, I need more here, I don't know what to do, right? That's the kind of person that can get better. And the problem with being the stoic that stuffs everything down is you're not actually avoiding paying that bill, right?

30:20It's like you just put it on a credit card. There's interest attached. Eventually, that bill comes due. Eventually, the thing you stuffed down comes exploding out. The closet's stuffed too full and the door blows open. And it's not good, right? So you have to be brave enough to do this? Now, the last thing I sort of wanted to talk about was this idea of being brave enough to be yourself, right? I think oftentimes in organizations, some of the reasons we don't have the tough conversations that we need to have, some of the reasons that people maybe don't get the shots that they deserve is they're afraid to sort of put themselves out sort of dealing with what you might call imposter syndrome, dealing with confidence issues.

31:15There's a story about a young Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister of England. She is applying for her first job out of college. She wanted to be a chemist. That's what she went to school for. And she's sitting there interviewing. She can read upside down and she can read what the interviewer across from her is writing about her in the moment. And she sees this older man write, this woman is too difficult to work here, which of course is offensive and awful, but in a sense true, right? Like she was way too difficult to be constrained to this tiny, nondescript, relatively meaningless job. She was meant for bigger and better things.

32:02You know, John Lewis talks about having learned from Rosa Parks the idea of causing good trouble, right? The trouble that challenges sacred cows that maybe makes people a little uncomfortable when you're not afraid to say what you think, when you're not afraid to advocate for, you know, changes that have been long delayed to address the things that other people are afraid to say. to push new ideas. One has to have the courage to do this, to go for it, to put yourself out there, to ask the tough questions, right? And sometimes asking for help is that, sometimes admitting that something has happened is that, sometimes questioning whole assumptions about an industry, about a job, about the way things are done.

33:02And these questions aren't always appreciated, not in the moment, at least, right? In retrospect, the changes that they bring about, the people that they bring forward, the reckoning that comes along with them, the improvements that come as a result of them, these things are all appreciated later. But in the moment, it can be scary. It can be uncomfortable. It can be difficult. It can be met with backlash. But where would we be if people didn't do that? And so that's sort of where I wanted to wrap up. And then I'm looking forward to talking about some of these ideas with all of you. When we see people who are brave enough to face the uncertainty of the moment that we're in, people who find some constructive element to put their energy and effort, people who start small, people who are brave enough to be vulnerable, people who cause good trouble.

34:00We see what the positive that comes out of that is. But also it's worth considering where we would be without those kinds of people. And that's why we have to be brave enough to follow in the footsteps of said people. One of my favorite poems is a poem called A Psalm of Life by Longfellow. And he says, the lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime. And then he says, and leaving behind us footprints in the sands of time. He says, footprints that will inspire other people in the future to make their own sort of progress and changes and deal with their own problems of their time.

34:49So as we look out at the past and we see that people have been through things like we've been through and gotten through it, as we look back on our own lives, as we look back on these last two years and we see that we've been through this moment of historical reckoning in so many ways, and yet here we are still standing, right? We have emerged from it. We We should emerge from that with a certain amount of confidence. We just live through a moment that will be written about in the history books. We made it through the other side, right? That should give us so much confidence and belief in ourselves about whatever the future hands us.

35:25And that's sort of where I wanted to wrap up with what Marcus really says. He says, you know, what will I meet the uncertainty of tomorrow with? He says, well, the same weapons that I met with the uncertainty of today, right? And when we think about what we've been through these last few years, and again, that we're still standing, it should give us a lot of confidence, a lot of courage to know that whatever the uncertainty of the next few years brings us, we know we can get through that. We know we've trained for it, right? We know we've been through a crucible that's given us a sense of our own capacities.

35:59And that's the final reminder that I wanted to give all of you. Thank you very much. You guys keep doing your work. I'm very much a client and appreciative user. Thank you, guys.

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36:56My 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.

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38:02That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like The Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you a ad-free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free. No interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for.

38:46And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20 % off your first year. Just 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.