The Most Disciplined Side Wins | Practice Silence

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1:04Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

1:44The most disciplined side wins. The right side doesn't just win because they're right. That's the sad lesson of history. Think of the stoic opposition outmatched against the tyranny of multiple Caesars. In fact, that was a battle that went back to the original Caesar, whom Cato had battled for years. To win, to fight for that stoic virtue of justice is a real struggle. It's one that doesn't always come out the way we want it to. But when it does, when good wins out over evil, it was never by chance. It was because the good drew on those other stoic virtues. They had the wisdom to be strategic and smart.

2:20They had the courage to be brave. They had the discipline to be, well, disciplined. And of course, that's what courage is calling and discipline is destiny are about. We've talked before about the discipline of the civil rights movement. These men and women didn't march in the streets haphazardly. It was done with military precision. And there's a great book about this by Tom Ricks called Waging a Good War, which he discussed on that Daily Stoic podcast. I'll link to that. As William Bradford Huey also writes in his book, Three Lives for Mississippi, civil rights activists were trained extensively in discipline, good conduct, and nonviolence.

2:55They understood they would be cursed, taunted, and struck by their opponents, and that the natural reaction would be to respond. They had to train this impulse out of themselves. He explained they trained by playing a game called redneck and, you know, the N-word. They would choose one group to be rednecks and the other would be the other, and they would see how long they could remain good-natured and smiling while the rednecks jostled them and called them terrible names. When you watch videos of those protesters endure incredible punishment in order to demonstrate their humanity, their strategy was designed to exploit modern media in the North, you have to know that it was a result of this training.

3:33It was not an accident. Discipline is not something you naturally are. It is a result of training, of hard work. Cato drew on his training when the crowd pelted him with brickbats and jeers. Rutilius Rufus, whose story we tell in Lives of the Stoics, he drew on his training as he responded to his cruel exile with poise and dignity. The Stoics, just like activists, didn't always win, but they showed themselves worthy of winning. They showed themselves to be the most disciplined side. They trained themselves in virtue, and so must we, for whatever battles and causes we will someday fight for. And look, I think it's really important that we see how interrelated the virtues are.

4:13You need courage to face danger and risk yourself. You need discipline not to be provoked, not to turn and run. And then of course, this has to be directed at justice. And then wisdom, which I'm writing about now, comes in because the astuteness, the strategic vision that these activists had is a huge part of it too. You can grab Courage is Calling, Discipline is Destiny, Right Thing Right Now, Anywhere Books Are Sold. I'll link to them in today's show notes if you want signed copies of me. And do check out Tom Ricks' Waging a Good War and his episode on the podcast. I think it was one of the best that we ever did.

4:46And I've loved that book. I've been raving about it ever since.

4:57Practice silence. This is from today's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal. Social media teaches us to have an opinion about everything. Silence beckons us to speak. We live in a loud culture and we try to keep up by being louder in return. And how much trouble does this cause us? How much might we learn if we spent more time listening to others than trying to sandwich our opinions in at every turn? How much of what we say do we come to regret? So really, the truly loud thing to say is nothing. So spend some time writing your thoughts down this weekend. See how many of them you can keep to yourself.

5:33Be bold in your silence and how much you hold your tongue this week. One of the benefits of philosophy is that it centers you. You come back to it. And so I'll give you four quotes today, two from Zeno, actually, that should help you and certainly helping me to think about. Zeno says, better to trip with the feet than with the tongue. It's inevitable, right? An actor goes on a press tour and they say something dumb because they're just forced to talk. They're forced to answer all these questions. But you get in trouble the more you talk. It's just something I found, as Robert Greene says, always say less than necessary.

6:06Another quote from Zeno, to a youngster talking nonsense, Zeno said, the reason why we have two ears and only one mouth is so we might listen more and talk less. It's beautiful. I love that. And then Plato, talking about Cato the Younger, says, Cato practiced the kind of public speech capable of moving the masses, believing proper political philosophy takes care like any great city to maintain the warlike element. but he was never seen practicing in front of others and no one ever heard him rehearse his speech. When he was told that people blamed him for his silence, he replied, better they not blame my life.

6:41I begin to speak only when I'm certain that what I'll say isn't best left unsaid. Beautiful. That's something I do try to carry forward when I do talks and stuff. People go, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? And I try to, on a pretty regular basis, maybe even once per talk, go, I don't know. I don't know about that. Because you don't want to get the habit of forcing an answer about things when you don't know. If you don't know, it takes courage to be like, I don't know, or I don't care. I have not studied that. I don't have enough information. To be okay being thought dumb or foolish, as Epictetus says.

7:16Silence does that. Practicing silence is a discipline. It takes discipline. It is not easy. And you will sometimes look silly and you will sometimes hurt people's feelings, but I think you'll hurt people's feelings less by not talking than you will by talking. And that gets us to the final quote. This is from Seneca's play, Theestes. He says, silence is a lesson learned from the many sufferings of life. Another great quote I love from Seneca says, when I think of all the things I said, I envy the mute, meaning he wishes he couldn't talk because he said so much dumb stuff that when he thinks back on it, he's almost overwhelmed with shame or awkwardness.

7:54And the hard parts about being a writer, having a social media presence is you know what's out there and you cringe. You think about it. There's always a tweet. There's always a dumb article. There's always a time you jumped out to take a hot take. You should have just left it there because you didn't know enough. You didn't put the work in. You didn't actually care. You forced it. You let your ego get a hold of you. And that never makes good work. So let's practice a little silence this week. If you have something to say, write it down in your journal. Don't say it on social media. Always say less than necessary.

8:24Try to say less than necessary. That's the Stoic way. Talk to you soon. If you want to come see me talk, you want to see me get over some of my own stage fright and you want to ask questions and hang out a bit, I would love to see you. I'm doing events in London, Rotterdam and Dublin in early November. And then after that, Vancouver and Toronto. This is all basically the 12th through the 20th. So it's going to be a busy November for me. So grab tickets, ryanholiday.net slash tour. Both the events in Australia sold out. So these will sell out also. So grab your tickets. I'll see you all soon.

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