This Choice Can Change Everything | Ask Daily Stoic

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3:04Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are 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.

3:40This choice can change everything. In March 2020, Brent Underwood drove from Austin, Texas, to the small California ghost town of Cerro Gordo, the one we were telling you about on Tuesday. He'd been slowly renovating it and turning it into a resort, and the plan was to stay there for a couple weeks while the caretaker of the town took a few weeks off to care for his sick wife. There was, after all, a pandemic going on, and it seemed like the ultimate place to socially distance. But then a freak series of snowstorms trapped him there in Cerro Gordo with no electricity, no running water, and certainly no opportunity to leave.

4:17As it happened, Daily Stoic, which Brent helped create, was at that very moment in the middle of trying to talk to people about what to do about the stress of a scary moment in the free time that lockdowns had forced upon us. It was during that time that we were putting together the Alive Time Challenge for the Daily Stoic, Brent explains in his amazing new book, Ghost Town Living. So I was thinking a lot about this. I was thinking about whether it was going to be a live time or dead time. And I kept going back, he says, to that fundamental Stoic lesson, separating things into what you can and can't control.

4:50As it happens, Brent had packed one of the cameras we use for the Daily Stoic YouTube channel. Choosing a live time, he started a YouTube channel of his own, Ghost Town Living, documenting his time spent living in the abandoned ghost town. The channel quickly grew a massive global following that has millions and millions, hundreds and hundreds of millions of views. And it wouldn't have happened had this other thing not happened to him. It was an adaptive response to his circumstances, turning a period of enforced solitude into an opportunity for storytelling, exploration, and sharing the history of this place that he loved.

5:22It's a great example of what the Stoics said. You can't control what has happened, but you can control how you respond. And of what Marcus Aurelius said, that we can turn everything that happens into fuel, that the impediment to action can actually advance action. And we can always find something to do, even when our original intention or plan is thwarted. We always have the choice between alive time and dead time. And this choice determines the course of our lives, whether what we face is an obstacle or an opportunity. And I'm just so proud of Brent. I mean, the book that just came out on Tuesday would not exist had he not responded to this overwhelming, stressful, surreal circumstance he found himself in.

6:03And the book is really, really great. I read an early copy of it. I got to help do passive edits on it too. You know, in the Justice book, which is coming out this summer, I have this chapter on coaching trees that we're judged not just on our own accomplishments, but what the people who work for and with us go on to do. And it's just been so cool to see Brent have all of this success, see people become a huge fan of him and get to see what I saw in him all those years ago when I hired him to be my intern. at Brass Check. And if you've seen any of his videos, you should definitely follow him on social media and go to Ghost Town Living, check out the YouTube channel.

6:41But he's just awesome. He's crushing it. And this book is fantastic. I love Sarah Gordon. My kids love the videos. We've been up there a bunch of times. It's one of my favorite places. Check out Ghost Town Living, Mining for Purpose and Chasing Dreams on the Edge of Death Valley. I think it's a great book up there with Desert Solitaire and some of those books in that category. It's going to be a favorite of yours, I'm sure. Brent has signed limited editions in The Painted Porch. I'll link to that in today's show notes. Check it out.

7:14Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast. Nothing is as humbling as seeing an earlier version of yourself, especially if the earlier version of yourself is confidently doing a thing that you now think you're much better at. So we were going through some old videos and we found this talk that I gave to LinkedIn as part of a speaker series back in May 2017, which is, I mean, I can barely remember that. I guess I would have had a one-year-old then. And I would have just published the Daily Stoic and just published Ego is Enemy. So that's what I was there. I was there to talk about ego is the enemy, which, you know, was doing okay.

8:00I guess it had been out for several months. The Obstacles Away, I think was just starting to pick up, but I was just so early in this. I was so young. I mean, it just seems madness to me that 2017 was seven, almost eight years ago. But that's one of the reasons we watch film. One of the reasons we want to be okay being uncomfortable as we see where we can do better. But we also see this version of ourself, this younger version of ourselves that was doing the best they could that isn't there anymore. There's a memento mori in it too, watching myself on this stage. I go, oh man, I didn't have as much gray hair.

8:35Oh man, it would have been easier for me to get up and travel because I didn't have as many commitments or obligations. And also I didn't know what I didn't know, which is of course a theme of Ego is the Enemy. Here's this talk. Thanks to the folks at LinkedIn for having me. Thank you all these years later for still being here. And I hope you enjoy this chat. I don't get to do the talks on Ego is the Enemy as much anymore. Every once in a while I do, but here's something from the vault. And I think it stands up well, although I am still always trying to do better and grow and learn. And if you've got feedback, let me know.

9:13Talk soon. Hi. I'm Penny. I'm here in sales. I really appreciate a lot that you have to say, especially those of us, I think, can relate that if you're in sales, you push yourself really hard. And so you tend to judge yourself by the external results as opposed to you know that you put in a good day's work. Of course. So I appreciate what you had to say. Thank you. I have a question, though, because I have a 12-year-old who already knows everything. Yeah, sure. So any suggestions for helping people that already think they know everything? Yeah, yeah. And maybe my pride is that, my ego is that I think I have something to offer him.

9:47Sure, sure. No, I think obviously part of that's probably just being 12. You know, I think most of us thought we knew way more than we did when we were 12. And sometimes there's a quote from Plutarch. I think it's in the book. But he's saying, I learned, you know, I learned from what I was reading or what people told me. And then when I had experiences, suddenly all those things made sense. So part of it might be, you know, if we're thinking about our own ego, it's like we need them to tell us that they heard us when it might be better to tell them these things and then understand that it's going to be a process to coming to terms with them.

10:24So it's like, what can you expose them to? What can you tell them? And not need to feel the control of knowing they got it right now, but knowing, you know, when they're 18, they're going to experience something. And suddenly what mom told me eight years ago or, you know, six years ago or whatever makes complete sense. I get it now. Like I, the number of things that my parents told me that, you know, suddenly now are like, oh, you were totally right about that. And I was a jerk, you know, when you tried to tell me. So I think that's, that's part of it. But I would say one of the things that I think is so hard for young people is like I'm just on the other side of the generation that didn't have to grow up with social media.

11:00It would be so hard to grow up in a world where everything you do and say and think has this sort of objective measure of, you know, Internet points on how good it is. And, you know, I've done a lot of studies that call this the imaginary audience. The reason a 12-year-old thinks that they can't go to school because they said something embarrassing is that psychologically they think people are paying way more attention to them than they actually are. But what social media does is create a real audience. Psychologists call it the imaginary audience. But now there is, it literally is an audience.

11:34So I would also think, how can you shield them from becoming dependent on these sources of validation that really can become addictions and complete distractions and maybe focus on some internal measurements as well would be great. Yeah. Hey. I would hypothesize that certain nationalities, races, and even genders display more ego. and those people that do display in those genders do sometimes show more success compared to people that would necessarily not have those egos. When you introduce the element of time into, say, you've only got a finite time to do things, how do you kind of make that balance between ego being a negative thing and ego being a positive thing?

12:20I think especially at LinkedIn, like where we were actually focused on kind of diversity and trying to make sure there's a level playing full on equality. Quite often it's difficult if you don't have that ego that you don't break through to be successful and you don't have forever to do those things. Yeah, so I think the element of time is important. So when you look at oftentimes I think ego is sort of like it's like a short-term solution that creates long-term problems. So if you're sort of, if you're, let's say, as I was saying, you're so talented that early on, you're able to, people are tolerating your ego, they're putting up with it, because you're the star performer or whatever.

13:02It can lead to problems down the road that you may not even, like, you look at a company like Uber, clearly extraordinarily successful. They did a lot of things that people said you shouldn't be able to do. But the problem is you're learning from that, that when people tell you you shouldn't do something, that they have no idea what they're talking about. And you run past all sorts of criticism and you think that you're winning, but really you're just piling up in the future a more catastrophic kind of failure or difficulty. And so I think part of it is the element of time, I think, where there's that Martin Luther King line, the arc of history is long, but it bends towards truth.

13:38You know, ego might show some short-term benefits, but at the end we all sort of regress towards that meme. I think that's part of it. I think people like Marshall are great counter examples that you can be successful. You can do really impressive things if you don't think about it this way. So that's kind of how I think about it is that I want to think long term. And then I also go, just because there's lots of successful people who have egos, doesn't mean the ego is why they were successful. And so we sometimes confuse that causation and correlation. was steve jobs uh great because he was an asshole or was he great because he was a great designer you know is kanye west successful because he has this huge ego or is it that he's so talented that it compensates for the ego but at some point that balance will shift and then the hall the fall is much greater thank you yeah hey there i have a question about um insecurity and ego so a lot of what I heard you talking about is kind of combating ego with like logical kind of philosophical ways.

14:43Is there, and in your experience, and I'm curious to hear your perspective on kind of combating some of that ego by focusing on like personal insecurities and kind of where those come from. I'm curious how that would. What do you mean by personal insecurities? Kind of like the idea that ego can come from a place where you need to get people's approval to feel like you're enough essentially. Um, yeah, I'm just kind of curious where that fits in kind of on a personal level, as opposed to thinking it as like a philosophical. No, no, I think it's interesting. Often the things that we are most sort of egotistical about are the things that we're most secure, insecure about.

15:18So it's like, you know, you can almost take, uh, the things that people are bragging about as the things that they feel the least secure about. Um, so that's always like sort of a good rule to look at. But, um, you know, one of the things that I think is interesting is like, I get a question a lot of people go like, okay, I see how some people are way overconfident and cause problems. What about people who are super insecure that they don't want to do things because they don't have enough ego? But I actually think there are two sides of the same coin. If you talk to someone who's like, you know, sort of paralyzed on their couch and they don't want to try or do anything, you talk to them about why and what they give you is all these reasons, these very well thought out logical reasons why the game is rigged, why they can't possibly be successful, why it's totally unfair, why you're totally wrong, whatever.

16:02On both sides, it's sort of an obsession with self, right? Like imposter syndrome, I think one of the ways I deal with it is I go, people are thinking about me way less than I think that they are, right? Like no one, like imposter syndrome for people who don't know is this idea that thinking that you're a fraud and that people are going to catch you and it's going to be really embarrassing. The reality is nobody is thinking about you at all. No one is thinking about whether you're an imposter or not. They don't care. They're focused on themselves, right? So I think one of the ways that ego and insecurity are related and maybe one of the ways you deal with it is to sort of get out of your own head and stop thinking about either.

16:45So just you're focusing on the work. You're focusing on being busy. You're sort of turning off that voice in your head that's just going on and on about whether you're amazing or whether you're a piece of shit or, you know, whatever. You're just not, you're just turning that off entirely. you're not focused on that and you're focused on, you know, sort of throwing yourselves into the work, the practice or whatever it is, that's one of the ways to tackle that. Thank you. Yeah. What was the catalyst for you that made you decide that this was the book you wanted to write? So I'd set up, I was interested in writing a book about humility.

17:16Um, and, uh, I was really interested in it and I was researching for it. And then this American apparel stuff happened. And, and one of the, one of the things that I think is really important in creative work, which people don't do right, is that they have their idea for what they think it should be. And they sort of blow past any reservations, any criticism. As I would try to explain the humility concept, it just clearly wasn't resonating. It wasn't working. And so I said, as I was trying to write this book, it wasn't writing. And so I ended up tackling it from the other side. I came at it from ego, which is the opposite of humility.

17:53And the idea started to come together. that the conversation I was telling you about happened. But when somebody tells you that they, and this has happened to me a couple times in life, so it wasn't just this one instance, but when somebody tells you they see something of themselves in you and then they catastrophically implode in a very public, avoidable way, you sort of go, whoa, I don't want that to happen to me. So part of it was watching someone that I admire and I respect and was very successful lose all the things that they worked for. And seeing that historically in my research happen over and over again, I was sort of wanting to not become a statistic, right, or not.

18:38You know, I was successful early in my life. My first book came out. I think I was a best-selling author at, like, 25. You know, I could see extrapolating out where that was going that maybe it could end in a similar direction, sort of not wanting to that. And it could still happen. So it's something you work on all the time. Yeah. so I'm not familiar with stoicism very much but when you talked about beginner's mind earlier and a couple other things that brought that kind of buddhism my mind and I was wondering if this is related at all to something like their idea of non-self so constantly making identity of everything that happens to us and is that related yeah so what I think is so and so a lot of my books are based on stoic philosophy I try not to talk about it too much because most people are not interested in philosophy.

19:21I just try to sort of present the lessons. But it's very interesting to me to think that Stoicism and Buddhism are two totally independent philosophies that had basically no overlap culturally, are developed at essentially the same time, and they come to the same, with some exceptions, the same sort of fundamental truths about the world. I think that's very interesting. It's almost like two species on different parts of the globe that evolved to have similar adaptations. So I do think there's a lot of connections between Stoicism and Buddhism and that part of what I think what you see over and over again, whether it's in literature or in philosophy, is that constantly warning that we are our own worst enemy, that, you know, failure doesn't come from the outside, but it's things that we invite into our lives.

20:09It's problems that we do. It's thinking too much about ourselves, sort of giving in to various sort of vices or passions that causes most of the pain and difficulty in our lives. That's what the Buddhists were trying to help people with, and that's also what the Stokes were trying to help people with. So I think it doesn't really matter where you get it from, but if you can come to these same ideas, there's a reason that 2 ,000 years ago, 3 ,000 years ago, people were already warning about these problems. And as modern life and technology has taken us in the direction that it's taken us, the same problems exist, but at an even larger scale.

20:45And I think you should avail yourself of that wisdom. Have you seen any issue with, it seems like kind of setting up ego as the enemy here. I've noticed in my own life that anything that I resist or that I'm fighting against just has that much more power over me. Because the Buddhists kind of, I guess they have an idea of kind of opening to something like ego, just welcoming it in. And then you can just laugh at it and see how silly it is. Is that a way to combat this? Sure, but I think it's saying the same thing. One is a book title, but the idea is you're bringing it in and laughing at it because you know it's not a positive force in your life, right?

21:23You're not bringing it in and laughing at it because it's amazing and it's helping you. You're trying to tackle it. You're tackling it with scorn as opposed to with sort of logic. But I think we're both saying the same thing, which is that ego is not a positive force in your life. And that whatever you can do to undercut it and undermine it is a recipe for clarity and strength and all these things. So, look, I like stoicism because it was designed for the Western world. And we live in the Western world. We don't live in a monastery, you know, in the hills of Asia. You know, we live in Marcus Aurelius is the most powerful man in the world.

22:01You know, he's doing, he's, Rome to me is, we live in the world that Rome gave us, not in the world that the samurai gave us, right? So I think in some ways, stoicism is more relevant. I think there's more there. But at the end of the day, they're kind of saying the same thing. Thank you. Thank you.

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