Temper Your Ambition | A Cautionary Tale From Napoleon Bonaparte

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1:05Welcome 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.

1:44Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a Sunday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I'm hard at work on the wisdom book right now. And one of the things I just finished this chapter this week, actually, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. One of the things I'm writing about is like sort of the ultimate form of wisdom is self awareness. If you don't understand yourself, it doesn't matter how many math equations, you know, how much history, you know, how brilliant you are. You're going to be constrained. You're going to get yourself in trouble because you don't know who you are. And you can still do important, impressive things, but I think there's a vulnerability or fragility to those things inherently.

2:24Self-awareness then being sort of one of these key virtues. And it ties into discipline because you have to know your weaknesses. You have to know your proclivities. You have to know yourself, what you're tempted to do. In Discipline is Destiny, which would be the second book in the series, I talked a lot about Napoleon. And I have a chapter on this essay contest that Napoleon entered as a young man. And it's a fascinating essay, as you'll see, because Napoleon basically predicts all of his vices, all of the trouble he gets himself. He basically spells out what would be his own downfall, what he didn't have the discipline to contain.

3:07and what so many powerful people don't have the discipline to contain. It's good to want to do things and to follow your talents and potential where they go. That's another thing I talk about in Discipline Assessment. I also talk about them in the Justice book, the idea of fulfilling your potential. If you don't, it deprives the world of something. But if all you're thinking about is your own potential, what you could achieve more and more and more and more, if you have this insatiable, quenchless ambition, it will inevitably destroy you. And in Napoleon's case, quite nearly destroyed the world.

3:41It destroyed France, destroyed the lives of millions of people. He's a cautionary tale. He's a brilliant general, but a cautionary tale for all the reasons we're going to talk about in today's episode. This is about tempering your ambition, right? The virtue of self-discipline is sometimes rendered as temperance, about curbing, checking the impulses, the desires, the proclivities. And we're going to be talking about something the Stoics talk a lot about, ambition. Mark Aurelius talks about ambition quite a lot in meditations. I'll link to some of the Daily Stoic emails we've done on ambition, just if you want to get the Stoic view on it a bit more.

4:18But in today's episode, I'm bringing you me, reading the audiobook of this chapter in Discipline is Destiny, which you can get anywhere where books are sold. If you want signed copies, you can go to store.dailystoic.com. I'll link to that in today's show notes. And I appreciate you all listening to the audiobooks. If my voice sounds a little different to you right now, it's because I got 20-ish pages left of the audiobook of the 10-year anniversary edition of The Obstacle is the Way, which I'll be announcing shortly. So my voice is a little fried. So I'm going to cut this intro off here and go to something I recorded when I was a bit fresher back in 2022.

4:51Discipline is destiny, the power of self-control, Temper Your Ambition.

4:59Temper Your Ambition. In 1791, a young Napoleon entered an essay contest with the hopes of winning its 1 ,200 franc prize. The prompt was a powerful one. What are the most important truths and feelings for men to learn to be happy? The essay took him six months to write, and he did not win, but at age 22 in his youthful excitement, he put down as good a warning about insatiable ambition as there ever was. What is Alexander the Great doing when he rushes from Thebes into Persia and thence into India? He is ever restless. He loses his wits. He believes himself God, the future conqueror would write.

5:45What is the end of Cromwell? He governs England, But is he not tormented by all the daggers of the Furies? Damning illustrations of the heights of intemperance. And if that weren't enough, Napoleon then moves in for the coup de grace with a pronouncement whose meaning is unmistakable. Ambition, which overthrows governments and private fortunes, which feeds on blood and crimes. ambition is, like all inordinate passions, a violent, unthinking fever which ceases only when life ceases, like a conflagration which, fanned by a pitiless wind, ends only after all has been consumed. If only the adult Napoleon had been reminded of these words during those turbulent, destructive years when he named himself Emperor of the French and mandated pompous titles for himself like serene highness and excellence.

6:43While he placed his incompetent relatives on thrones across Europe, if only someone could have reminded him of his own feelings about the perils of unchecked ambition. But wait, somebody actually did. In the early 1800s, Talleyrand, his foreign minister, dug up the essay in the archives and gave it to Napoleon as both a gift and a warning which his imperial and royal majesty, yet another title he gave himself, refused to accept as either. The author deserved to be whipped, Napoleon said of his younger self. What ridiculous things I said and how annoyed I would be if they were preserved, he exclaimed as he threw what he thought was the only copy into a fire.

7:29A short time later, he would once again litter the continent with a generation of bodies and find himself exiled to a rock in the ocean where he could do no more damage to humanity.

7:47We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at The Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence. My wife introduced me to Dr.

8:24Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for Good Inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the Holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr. Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being.

9:05And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events.

9:19For much of history, Alexander was the cautionary tale for unfettered ambition. Sure, he was brilliant. Sure, he accomplished incredible things. Where did it leave him? Empty, alone, unhappy. Go, he found himself taunting his own men when they finally realized he would never be satisfied. Go tell your countrymen that you left Alexander completing the conquest of the world. Except he died almost immediately after and his empire collapsed with him. The poet Juvenal remarked that the whole world had not been big enough to contain Alexander, but in the end, a coffin was sufficient. And what had it all been for?

10:00Like Napoleon, it hadn't been about his people or about a cause. He had waged wars of offense and aggression entirely for himself. This was a pathological need to achieve, for which the consequences were ultimately borne by basically everyone else. There is a considerable amount of self-discipline required to quit bad habits, particularly the more gluttonous ones. But of all the addictions in the world, the most intoxicating and the hardest to control is ambition. Because unlike drinking, society rewards it. We look up to the successful. We don't ask them what they are doing or why they are doing it.

10:39We only ask them how they do it. We conveniently ignore how little satisfaction their accomplishments bring them, how miserable most of them are, and how miserable they tend to make everyone around them in turn. Seneca, a man whose ambition got him into trouble like Napoleon, would say of a ruthless general named Marius, the Napoleon of his time, that while Marius commanded armies, ambition commanded Marius. He lamented the leaders and business people and conquerors who disrupted and disturbed the world while they themselves were disturbed and disrupted. Marius and Napoleon and Alexander were powerful, but ultimately powerless because they couldn't stop, because there was never enough.

11:23They lusted for control over millions because they lacked control over themselves. Just as we do with our relationship to drugs or devices, we have to ask ourselves, who is in charge? Our mind or our slavish need to be the biggest, the winningest, the richest, the most powerful or the most famous? The need to do more, to get more, to achieve again and again. We have to ask, what is this really bringing me? What am I actually getting out of it? Did Napoleon's accomplishments make him happy? Power and wealth didn't even make him secure. Besides the guilt and shame which he clearly deserved, he died alone on his second island in the middle of the ocean.

12:05Now, this criticism doesn't mean that all accomplishments are to be scorned. What would the world look like if nobody tried to do anything, if nobody pushed to get better or do more? If we didn't have ambition, some big goal we were after, how would we know what the little things, what distractions to say no to? Ambition is good, but it must be tempered. Like all elements of self-discipline, it is about balance. The monk or the priest who tries to reduce their needs to nothing, who rejects everyone and everything in pursuit of spiritual perfection is not all that dissimilar to the billionaire who keeps building and building or the quarterback who can't even consider retiring.

12:45At the same time, the person who dreams of nothing, who believes in nothing, who tries nothing, well, that's not really the point either. What we're talking about here is really temperament. we must have a sense of self and worth that can check our ceaseless ambition before it o 'erleaps itself, as Shakespeare warned. Without the break that prevents us from getting carried away, ambition not only deprives us of happiness, but it can very well destroy us and harm others, as the insatiable conquerors invariably do. Whether it's innocent victims of the wars they wage, the people they use and discard on the way up the ladder, the family they neglect in the process or the countless imitators they inspire.

13:25We don't need accomplishments to feel good or to be good enough. What do we need? The truth? Not much. Some food and water, work that we can challenge ourselves on, a calm mind in the midst of adversity, sleep, good routine, a cause we are committed to, something we're getting better at. Everything else is extra or worse, as history has shown countless times. the source of our painful downfall.

13:57Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

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