Sometimes Words Are Very Unnecessary | Robert Greene's 10 Stoic Laws For A Better Life

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3:05On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

3:20Sometimes words are very unnecessary. Look, it definitely happened. It's definitely not what you wanted or expected to happen. A shipment was lost. Money was stolen. Something broke. But can you leave it at that? The Stoics talked about how events don't need your opinion. They aren't asking to be judged or labeled or explained by you. They were saying what Depeche Mode once said, that sometimes words are very unnecessary, that they can only do harm. The silence is difficult though, isn't it? We feel so compelled to talk about what happened, why it happened, how annoying it is that it did happen, how much the fact that it happened is going to cost us.

3:59But what does this do for us? What does it do about what happened? Not much. It just belabors. It stirs up resentments and anger. It distracts. It takes us away from what we do control, what does matter, which is how we respond. which is how we change ourselves in light of the unchangeable new wrinkle in reality, which is our courage and dignity as we go through life in a world where we are not in control, where stuff will most definitely, indefinitely, indefinitely keep happening. The need for certainty is the greatest weakness that humans have. It's almost like a disease. And it's preventing you from seeing the true reality of the phenomenon around you.

4:43And it's a deadly factor in any kind of creative venture.

4:51To me, he's one of the great living philosophers of our time, someone whose work you should absolutely be familiar with. In fact, no one has taught me more about applying stoic wisdom to your actual life. His works have changed the lives of athletes and musicians and world leaders, and he directly changed my life. I'm talking about the great Robert Greene. I think one of the greatest, most brilliant minds of our time is Robert Greene. 48 Laws of Power, Art of Seduction, Mastery, Laws of Human Nature, The Daily Laws. I'm Ryan Holiday. The Daily Stoic wouldn't exist without Robert Greene. The books that I've written wouldn't have existed without Robert Greene.

5:24The places that I've talked, the work that I've done wouldn't exist without Robert Greene. Robert himself once showed me his copy of Marcus Aurelius, which had tons of little notes in the corner. So he's been a practitioner of Stoic philosophy for many years. And in today's episode, I want to give you some more stoic wisdom from the one and only Robert Green.

5:47Sticking the most stoic law of power is always say less than necessary. Because of the discipline and the self-control and then also the indifference to what other people say or think. So always saying less than necessary, not needing to prove someone else wrong, not needing to explain yourself. just sort of being contained with who you are and not worrying about anything else. Yeah, that's part of it. Yeah, it feels like actually like almost all the laws of power are in some way rooted in some kind of self-discipline. Yeah. And the idea that, I think there's Seneca, he said, no one is fit to rule who is not first master of themselves.

6:27Yeah. Like you first have to have power over you for you to be able to play the game of power in some way. There's this Seneca, I think he was talking about Marius, the Roman general. I said Marius commanded armies, but ambition commanded Marius. So if you're not ultimately in command of yourself, your power over others or over the world won't last very long. Your ability to make the right decisions depends on knowing the situation kind of in a John Boyd sort of sense. And when you have power and it accumulates and time goes by, you start isolating yourself from that kind of ooda loop type situation and you start listening to what other people are saying about you you start getting a set you become more inside your own little tower and you have less access to the world and to information and your decisions start to become delusional to think is what's happening yeah i think in the 33 strategy of war you talk about how you have to take to reality like a spider in its web and the longer you are powerful or important or people are telling you you're amazing the harder it is to keep your grasp on reality because you don't know what's real because people are deceiving you and you're deceiving yourself yeah so you and i are going to be doing two talks in september are we yes yes hopefully uh one here in los angeles and one in seattle yeah and it's I actually, it's funny when we were trying to think of the time, I think you and I were thinking it much more of a discussion and they were thinking, well, what are you going to tell people?

8:03But I think actually, if you think about things more as a discussion, you learn more. Yeah. Yeah. I like to keep things a little bit open-ended and I've noticed myself that the times I think I understand that I had the most control, I've written everything out and organized it. I do the worst jobs, but if I kind of keep my mind open in the moment, it just, we had a good time when we did that in Los Angeles before. Yeah, we did one here, the LA live talks, I think. Yeah, we didn't prepare for that. No, we didn't. Not that we're not going to prepare or that we're just winging it. It'll be September 19th in LA and then it'll be September 21st in Seattle.

8:41Yeah. And I think we're talking power, mastery, strategy, philosophy, all of - Ego. Yes, all under the bucket of life, how to get better at life.

8:54Character is the core of a person, something they can't control, something that comes from deep within, and it causes people to have patterns of behavior. And you want to find people who have a strong character to associate with, as opposed to a weak character. And what a strong character is, is people who are adaptable, who are fluid, who can admit that they are wrong, who can learn from their experience, who can take criticism, who can work with other people. So one of the parts of this book is I want you to focus not on people's charming exterior, on their funny words, on their wit, on their charisma.

9:33Instead, focus on that deep inner quality, that core, that character, because that's who they really are. Your character is creating what happens to you in life. There's the famous quote of the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, character is fate.

9:52People only have the sense of pleasure, particularly now, that it has to be immediate, that they have to get quick gratification. They need quick hits. But I'm trying to say to take those three years and to write a book like Ryan does gives you a much deeper thrill, a much more important sense of pleasure, what I would call fulfillment. Yes. Than just having that empty, I'm suddenly the CEO of a company and I'm famous and I'm on Instagram. it's so empty it doesn't lead anything it's just going to make you more depressed in the end but the sense that you've actually built something yourself leads to the deepest pleasure that a human can have I'm sorry to say that the sense of accomplishment of creating something from nothing from building something is to me the highest pleasure that a human can have because we are animals that are that are born to make things

10:43the number one commodity that you want that's going to make you a master is creativity if you're a creative thinker i don't care if you're working at subway or wherever you're going to end up at a great place the only people that ever get to that point who are the true masters who we know and it doesn't mean you have to reach the steve jobs level there are a lot of mini steve jobs out there is by being yourself. If there are 50 other people like you out in the world, why you? Somebody else can do what you do and you're never going to be great. You're never going to be brilliant. But if there's only one you, if you have a skill, a knowledge base, you've learned three different fields and you're combining them and there's nobody else like you, then you've written your own ticket to power and success because you're unreplaceable.

11:38But so people have this wrong impression about stoicism, which came back to something we were talking about yesterday, where they kind of accuse you sometimes of not being stoic, or it's a struggle. Even for Marcus Aurelius, it was a continual struggle. Even for Epictetus, it was a continual struggle. It's not like you're suddenly a stoic, you've got a diploma. You're continually struggling with your human nature. And if it wasn't a struggle, would it be that admirable? Like if you were just born that way or if it was you read this book and then you magically become this way, how impressive would that be?

12:12It's like we love the Tom Brady's of the world or the whatever, because they shouldn't be able to do what they're doing because they were a six round draft pick. Because they're not Drew Brees isn't tall enough. It's that they're doing it in spite of everything that makes it impressive or admirable. Right. So it's the resistance that kind of makes you stronger. Like sometimes I wish, damn it, why couldn't I have been born in like the 19th century or in ancient Athens? You know, there's some things about the 2020 that I just don't like, you know. I would have been so much happier, but then I have so much to resist against.

12:48Yeah. That it almost is almost like a form of pleasure that I have to like struggle even harder to focus on reading. And reading a book now, reading Nietzsche or reading Marcus Aurelius, is triple the pleasure when you live in a world that's so antithetical to it, right?

13:10Yeah, I wrote once that the need for certainty is the greatest weakness that humans have. It's almost like a disease. And it's because the world itself is mysterious. It's complicated. You know, just dealing with people. A person is like another world, is like an alien. They have their own thoughts. You're never going to understand their emotions completely. They're a total mystery to you, right? And you can't get through life without understanding people. And so what you do naturally is you simplify everything because you don't like the feeling of not understanding people or events in the world.

13:47you're full of anxiety and you want to kind of reduce things to pat little formulas that make it so you say, I'm certain about this idea. I know what's going to happen tomorrow. I know what my wife or my spouse or my children are thinking, et cetera, right? And so it's like a defense mechanism and it's preventing you from seeing the true reality, the mystery, the complex nature of a phenomenon around you. And it's a deadly, deadly, deadly factor in any kind of creative venture because the creative spirit, this is what John Keats called negative capability, is to be able to postpone that need for certainty and say, I can entertain two ideas that might be contradicting each other at the same time, but I'm okay with it.

14:32I don't need the answer. My mind is open and I'm exploring ideas and maybe I'll settle upon an answer eventually. But for the moment, I'm open to the mystery and that's the source of creativity. So having this certainty is a mental disease that blocks you from any kind of creative thinking.

14:54Do you believe that through your own effort, through education, through consciousness, through thinking, through reflecting, you can improve yourself? Do you fundamentally, deep down in Syria, right in the center of your gut, do you believe that? Because some people will say, yeah, I do, but they don't really believe it. They think inside that it's luck, it's circumstances. People who believe in crutches, they don't think that it comes from somewhere inside. I think you can make a division there and there. Do you really in your gut believe that through your own efforts, no matter what happens to you, you can, through learning, et cetera, improve yourself.

15:37Personally, I could say that the 48 Laws of Power, I was younger, I was more energetic, and it just spilled out of me, and it has that visceral appeal. And then I would say, but as I got older, I've kind of learned more, and I've kind of made more nuanced arguments. Now, that could be me justifying my own aging and decreptitude, and putting a little sauce on it, or there could be some reality to it. As I get older, I come to this idea of continually reminding myself that I don't know. I've been reading a fair amount of Plato lately, and Socrates is spinning through my head a lot. But this idea of you think you know something, but you really don't know at all.

16:17Your knowledge of an event or what you think the world is, it's just like something hitting the surface. It's very hard to realize that. And so the humility of saying, I don't really know the answer here, and maybe I kind of missed the mark, or I've got a thing. I'm constantly going through it as I'm writing now. You know, that idea sounds exciting, but it's not really true, and re-examine it, re-examine it. There's a physicist, John Wheeler, he's like the inventor. His line is, as the island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of ignorance. Yeah. And so you're either understanding that you're learning more or you're understanding that you're bumping in to what you don't know.

16:58Those are simultaneous expansions.

17:05It's a truth. It's a principle that will stand the test of time. It doesn't matter what happens in the world. It's not like the pandemic is suddenly going to prove Nietzsche was wrong. The idea is things happen in the world. 98 % of it's beyond our control. We're constantly dealing with pain. We're all going to die, right? Life involves obstacles, as you titled your book, etc. Yeah, there's no getting around it. Right. So what is the point of kind of complaining or pushing against them? To Nietzsche, that meant you are denying life itself because life involves adversity and pain. If you embrace the pain, if you embrace the adversity, you are embracing being alive itself.

17:53But when I had a stroke, you know, everything that was a pleasure in my life was taken away from me, swimming, hiking, biking, etc. And then I had to find, well, what's the point? This just happened. I had to accept it. Right. And I have to find a way of finding something, lessons from it that are incredibly valuable. So when you have amor fati, when you say everything happens for a purpose and everything contains a potential for me to turn it into some incredibly valuable lesson, it means that you love life itself.

18:28A quote from T.S. Eliot is something to the effect that we humans have a little stomach for reality. And basically, we love illusion. We love stories. We love fiction. We don't really like reality. And, you know, we see it very much in our culture. Who do we venerate the most in this culture? We don't venerate philosophers, if there are any more philosophers. We don't venerate, you know, practical people who build things. We venerate movie stars and celebrities, people who manufacture illusion, who are fake to the core. That's what we admire. But it's always been that way. There's a Latin expression.

19:08I can't remember it off the top of my head that it means we humans love deception. We love to be deceived. And even as children, what we love more than anything was to hear a story. So I've incorporated that in my books. I always begin each chapter with a story, kind of lure you into my book. So your stomach for reality isn't natural to you. You don't want to know who you really are. You don't want this mirror held up to you that shows you that you have narcissism and envy and aggression. You want to imagine that you're Marlon Brando, that you're somebody that you're handsome and beautiful and wonderful.

19:49To see that mirror is there. Ah, that's who I am. Yes, that's who you are. So if you're able to overcome that love of fantasy and illusion and dip your feet a little bit in reality, you're going to have an advantage over other people. You're going to make better decisions in life. You will be able to know how to peddle illusions and how to peddle deception in order to appeal to people and seduce them. You will have more control the further you dip your feet into the pool of reality. When I wrote The Daily Stoic eight years ago, I had this crazy idea that I would just keep it going. The book was 366 meditations, but I'd write one more every single day and I'd give it away for free as an email.

20:34I thought maybe a few people would sign up. Couldn't have even comprehended a future in which three quarters of a million people would get this email every single day and would for almost a decade. If you want to get the email, if you want to be part of a community that is the largest group of Stoics ever assembled in human history, I'd love for you to join us. You can sign up and get the email totally for free. No spam. You can unsubscribe whenever you want at dailystoic.com slash email.

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