There Is No Better Time Than Now | Ask DS

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0:54I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods. and we 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.

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1:44Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics. We're trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening. And we hope this is of use to you.

2:30There is no better time than now. We all have vices. We all have flaws. We all have things we know we want to change. But what happens? Nothing happens. This is true for everyone, even Martin Luther King Jr. One day, King said, we tell ourselves, I'm going to rise up and drive this evil out. I know it's wrong. It's destroying my character and embarrassing my family. But then he says, at last the day came and you made a New Year's resolution that would get rid of that evil. and then the next year came around and you were still doing the same old thing. Can you remember the surprise and disappointment that gripped you when you discovered that?

3:04After all that you had done through your resolutions to get rid of it, the old habit was still there, he said, and out of amazement, you found yourself asking, why should I not, why could I not cast it out? Seneca reminds us that all fools have one thing in common. They're always getting ready to start. They're always getting ready to change. And then, and then, and then they never do. They never do the work. and rooting out evil in your life takes work. Same with losing five pounds, quitting smoking, breaking the smartphone addiction, drinking less, reading more. And to that end, it's worth repeating Epictetus's question.

3:36How much longer are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself? You must stop delaying. You must get started today, right now. A new year is upon you. Is there a better time than now? No, there is not. So let's go. And look, for the last five years, I've been struggling with my own issues, as I think everyone has. And I come around to the New Year's and I try to make a commitment. I try to challenge myself to actually do something about the things that I want to change. And that's where the New Year New You Challenge came, the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge. It's 21 actionable challenges, one per day, built around the most timeless wisdom and stoic philosophy.

4:14They're designed to help you do what King was talking about, what Epictetus was talking about, rising up, driving out the bad, taking action to become the person you're capable of being. It's not theoretical stuff, but real practical actions, stuff you actually have to do. And yes, challenges that are hard. That's the point. That's what we're trying to start the year off with. And I'd love to see you do that with me. I'd love for us together to be reflecting a few months from now, a year from now, and go, I did it. I cast it out. I'd love for you to join us. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com slash challenge.

4:44Or if you're thinking about doing Daily Stoic Life, you can join that and you get this challenge for free as part of that membership. So I'd love to see you either in Daily Stoic Life at dailystoiclife.com or just do this challenge. Start small. Don't make it more complicated than it needs to be. Dailystoic.com slash challenge. I'll see you in there.

5:15Hey, it's Ryan. So back in March, I gave a talk at West Point virtually. I spoke to this mass media and American politics class, which I was very honored to do. They'd actually assigned my book, Trust Me, I'm Lying, which is inconceivable to me that back when I was writing that book in my little apartment in New Orleans, Louisiana, that it would be part of the curriculum at the preeminent military school in the world. basically all of this would have been unreal and unbelievable to me. And so in today's episode, I'm bringing you a chunk of that Q and A with some of the cadets and I hope you enjoy.

5:58It's always a privilege for me to talk to the young men and women in uniform or soon to be in uniform. And I've always liked talking to college classes. So here's me talking stoicism, media, politics, a bunch of stuff that's all happening in the world. And I hope you enjoy this little chat. Back on your website from earlier, I remember seeing temperance, moderation, self-control. I was like, oh, discipline, that's a new word. So that's interesting to kind of know that's kind of how it's morphed. Well, in the preferred translation of Mark's real, I said, I love the Gregory Hayes translation. He tends to render it as self-discipline or sometimes does.

6:40And so, you know, that was a decision that ultimately I made. And there was a bunch of different ways I was going to title or present that book. You know, I was going to talk about self-discipline or that's what was going to be the packaging where I was, there's a, there's an Eisenhower quote that I love that's in the intro of the book, but he says, freedom is better defined as the opportunity for self-discipline. Right. And, and to me that captures what the virtue of sofrasine or discipline or self-discipline is really about, that it's the things that you can do but choose not to, right? Military discipline is, I think, different than the virtue of discipline.

7:18The discipline that is imposed on you, right, or drilled into you is, of course, very important. Is it the same as the virtue of discipline? I I don't know. My argument in the book is that we're talking about the discipline that you enforce on yourself. And oftentimes when I sign the book, I underline just the word self, because I think it's so easy to think of discipline as this sort of standard to which we hold the world and ourselves, as opposed to what I think it rightly is, which is the standard that we hold ourselves to. This going back to the very basis of stoicism, the dichotomy of control, you control yourself, you don't control other people.

7:58And so discipline is a virtue that, that primarily emanates from, from inside the house, so to speak. And it's interesting, like, cause, cause thinking about how Marcus Aurelius, he has these lines, um, I forget where it is, but he's saying, you know, when, when someone is mean or rude, you know, that's, that's, that's just their job. Like that's their fate, um, which is very different than from like how he reflects on his own sort of, what he seems to think of as like failings or struggles. In terms of like my students with the, you know, as they're learning discipline, you know, sort of that external discipline force on them, what might they take from like the virtue of discipline and sort of carry forward?

8:48Well, to go back to that idea from Marcus, I think Marcus's best line about this idea is tolerant with others, strict with yourself, right? And I think that's a great way to think about it. As far as the discipline that we are instructed in or taught in or pick up as part of our profession, I'm not saying there's no value in it. There's of course an immense amount of value. And especially when you're young, this is part of how you are trained in things. So it becomes a muscle memory. You're being taught to do something that's perhaps not natural or not the way that most people act or think because what you're trying to do is inherently not natural, right?

9:26Military discipline is there to support you and edify you in the most unnatural moments that there are, right? Whether we're talking about combat or moments of sort of stress or very high stakes. And so being instructed in that virtue early on, being taught the discipline, you know, it becomes sort of a part of you. I learned to write as the research assistant for another writer. And that discipline, that practice, the way that my mentor, Robert Greene, did that is today the way that I do it. Now, I now have the ability for that to be self-discipline as opposed to external discipline. And I have the ability to tweak and adjust and put my own spin on things.

10:10But I'm still more or less following the same practices that I learned when I was 19, 20, 21 years old about how writing works, how reading works, how thinking works, how research works. You learn these things early on. You pick up habits until they become just sort of part of who you are. You know, sort of thinking about the discipline and then, you know, them in particular as soldiers who I believe 80 percent is the number that go into combat arms from West Point. And that can be quite, you know, life or death struggles where split second decisions really make a difference. In terms of like stoicism, what might that sort of help them?

10:53Well, you know, I spoke at the Naval Academy a few months ago and right as I was coming up there, I was reading Walter Lord's incredible biography or sort of, I guess it's not really a biography. It's a narrative nonfiction book, but he's one of the great nonfiction writers of all time. He wrote a book about the sinking of the Titanic. And then he wrote a book about the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Pearl Harbor one being called A Day of Infamy. And he has this section in the book where this guy, I'm forgetting his name, he had literally just graduated from the Naval Academy and he's on his first posting on a ship in Pearl Harbor.

11:28And, you know, they're being bombed. They're sort of trapped below deck, you know, taking cover. And the guy that's on the deck, you know, shooting the machine gun is, you know, is killed and he has to send someone up to fill that spot. And he says, you know, in an instant, I understood everything they were teaching us at Annapolis, the training and the drills and the gold braids and the plebe week. And, you know, all he was like, I understood in an instant because he asked these people to go and they went right. Like he was sending them into the the worst environment you could possibly send a person in to fill in for a person who had just been killed in a surprise attack that no one yet even fully understood on a ship that was literally on fire.

12:17And so, you know, in that moment, he understands the discipline, right? And, and I think we can understand this in more casual situations in our life. You know, we, we, we practice things, we prepare things. And so we can, in moments of stress or difficulty, big or small, we want to be able to say what Epictetus said the purpose of philosophy was. He says, you want to be able to say in any and every situation, this is what I trained for. That's what philosophy is about. That's what stoicism was about. So Marcus Aurelius is suddenly thrust into absolute power where he's worshiped as a God. And he says to himself, no role is so well suited to philosophy as this one.

12:56He's basically saying, this is what you trained for. And it's why it's one of the exceptions where that absolute power does not corrupt absolutely. And so we can think about this in military situations. You know, you can think about this. I was driving here today and my seven-year-old was acting insane. And, you know, I had to say to myself, you know, what good is this philosophy you're studying if you're going to lose your temper at a scared child, right? And so the whole point is this is what you train for. This is what it's all about, whether you're having to go over deck in the middle of a surprise attack or you're just trying not to get upset by the traffic that you're stuck in or you're trying not to react in a self-destructive fashion after you just got passed over for a deserved promotion.

13:42This is what the philosophy is really about. One letter we read by Seneca, he talks about the sort of external habits of like sleeping on the ground, wearing dirty clothes, not getting haircuts, stuff like that. And so he's talking about like the sort of the physical habits that that people might show. Do you think like does modern stoicism have or do you have any sort of habits like that that stem from the mental? Yeah. So that practice from Seneca, I think it's really important. He's not being blase about poverty. The reason Seneca is practicing this poverty, he said, was to be able to say to himself, is this what you're afraid of?

14:28And so later, I mean, I think it's too late in Seneca's case, but later when he has to go to Nero and say, you can have it all back, you can confiscate my entire fortune, but this is beyond the pale for me and I'm out of here. That's why Seneca was practicing those things, right? So he wasn't afraid. And I interviewed in this room, I interviewed Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who was an Air Force veteran who did multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. And we were talking about, you know, the fear that so many congressmen and women have or had about losing their job, about not being a congressman or congresswoman anymore or a senator anymore, and how that prevents them from doing what they obviously know is the right thing.

15:09And for him, his point was, you know, if I'm going to be willing to, he says, you know, send men or women into combat, life or death situation, I have to be willing to risk my job when I think that that's, but that is, I can imagine risk, like his practice risking his life is formative in the ability to risk your job. I'd love for that to be a more transferable skill than it was. It doesn't seem like the combat veterans have always done the right thing over the last couple of years politically. But the idea of practicing these things physical, I'll give you an example. I told you at the beginning of this that I wasn't feeling really good.

15:47I got a horrible bout of food poisoning, which I woke up with on Saturday. And I had a talk last night that I had to do in person that was too late to reschedule or cancel. And part of what I thought about was like, look, when I get up and run, I don't feel like doing it, right? It's hard. But I know that there's like the limits in my head and what I feel in my body and what I'm actually capable of. And that this is going to be 40 minutes on stage. I can easily do that. And I might pay for it later as we often do with exercise or physical activity. But like, I know what I'm capable of. And I know that I've cultivated the muscle that does the thing you're capable of, but uncomfortable with doing.

16:24And I think that's a big, big part of the stoic practice. I'm sure all of us can relate to the running.

16:37Thanks 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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