This Is A Choice You’re Making | Ask Daily Stoic

0:05Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com.

1:09think if we can just get through this or that rough patch, we can relax and not be so worried anymore. Of course, it never works out that way. No one has ever gotten there and reported back on their worry-free life. Just as you must have noticed how this has gone with the progress you have made, you have more than you did today. How do you feel? Have all your problems disappeared? Does that mean that worry is just a part of life that stress is ever present, no matter how successful or powerful we get? Well, no, unless you choose for it to be. In meditations, Mark Surreale talks of his anxiety.

1:43He realizes that it's not coming from anything external, it's within him. It is a choice he is making. This is not to say that things cannot be made easier by money, or that your lack of money isn't a problem. It's that simply having and not having something is an external. Worry, doubt, anxiety, stress, indeed any emotion we experience in our lives is internal. We have influence over the latter, not the former. So let's try to solve the problem where it will actually make a difference. Let's stop lying to ourselves saying it will all be better in the future because the present isn't the problem.

2:16None of the external things are. It's our emotions that are at the root of our discomfort. They are within us. They are our responsibility to work on.

2:30Hey, it's Ryan. And welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Back in November, I went over to Europe and then Canada to do a bunch of talks. You probably heard me talk about this already too much. I'm not going to tell you about where to get tickets because, well, you're a couple months late. But I spoke first in London, then in Rotterdam, and then Dublin was my last talk in Europe. We spent like a couple days in London, like one day in Rotterdam, and then a bunch of days in Dublin, which is one of my favorite places, one of my favorite places to run, One of my favorite places to eat and hang out and study history.

3:03We took the kids with us, so they really enjoyed it. They loved going to the jail because we'd just been in Australia. And they were blown away that Ned Kelly's father was in that jail in Dublin because I'd shown him pictures of the armor and stuff. So they're kind of wrapping their head around that. We went to a castle they were pretty excited about. We go to this, whatever, the big sort of government house castle that the British, I think it's Dublin Castle. we're walking into this building right and we go up the stairs and what do they have a huge picture of seneca so the kids recognize that that was fun what does this have to do with today's episode well i am bringing you some of the q and a from that talk in dublin it was uh i think the best attended talk of all of them i did i love being in ireland they were very good to me thanks to everyone who came out along the tour.

3:54Thank you for listening. And I hope you enjoy this little Q &A episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. We 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.

4:35My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky'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.

5:13Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events.

5:33Hi, Ryan. Thanks very much for your speech. I want to say that your book, Obstacles the Way, helped me finish my master's thesis. Thank you for that. I want to ask you about when you know something or someone is like annoying you or whatever, but you can't accept that they don't maybe agree with you, how to kind of have peace with that and not let it kind of take your own peace away? One of my favorite quotes from the Stoics, it's in Meditations. Mark Srela says, remember, you always have the power to have no opinion. He says, things are not asking to be judged by you. Now imagine this is being said by a person whose opinion was literally law.

6:20He had the life and death power over people. And here he is reminding himself to live and let live, that he doesn't have to let things bother him. He doesn't have to try to change everything. He can just let some things be. And now this sounds like not much of a power. You always have the power to have no opinion. but how many people do we know that have no such power right i mentioned elon musk earlier elon musk is a incredibly powerful incredibly wealthy person but has he ever had an opinion he was able to keep to himself not that i know of it's a hard thing to do to just shut up you know to just focus on your stuff that's what i try to do in in my life as best as i can something i'm going through with my kids, like I'll be like, oh wait, I don't need to have an opinion on whether this show is good or not.

7:10You like it. I like that expression. You don't have to yuck someone else's yum. You like it. So it's good to you. It's not something I need to convince you of otherwise. Hi, Ryan. I have a question on how do you decide or what's the logic for choosing which battles to fight? I agree with what you're saying. You need to be courageous. You need to stand up. sometimes it might come or you might think it's not worth sure doing that how do you gauge that yeah i think um it's a tough one i wish there was some hard and fast rule or some formula i think these are it's probably one of the areas you want to trust your gut you don't just do everything that pops into your head you're just going to be responding emotionally to stuff but i think one of the things i try to think about as a test when i'm thinking about doing something or not, this isn't just in matters of justice, is, you know, if I didn't do this, if I didn't say this, if I didn't take on this project, if I didn't do this task, would it get done by someone else?

8:11Or am I the best person to do this thing, right? So as you're deciding what to get involved in, what to speak up about, et cetera, being the 5 ,000th or 5 millionth voice to be chiming in on something, maybe that's not the best use of your time and energy. That's not the stand you need to take. But what are the things that you are uniquely qualified or uniquely positioned or uniquely inspired to be involved with? And that's probably what I would use to direct me towards what to get engaged with and not get engaged with. Hey, Ryan, Jack here. So over the past 10, 12 years, your output has been pretty prolific and very consistent in structuring uh your time in a week a month a year how do you structure your your work on projects um to maintain that consistency and and where does your time off come in and all that the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing as they say so for me that's writing writing is the main thing there's other things i like there's other things that i find enjoyable or fun.

9:22There's other things that are lucrative, but the main thing for me is writing. So I always have this kind of weather vane that tells me how my decisions are going or my priorities are if I have time to write or not, right? Because that's the driver of everything that I do. And it's also what I wanted to do. And as I've said before, like the reward for succeeding as a writer should not be that you don't have time to write. And I think that's true for whatever it is you do. You love basketball. The rewards for having a successful career in that shouldn't be that you don't remember the last time you saw a basketball game in person.

9:59And so what's your main thing and building around that is, I think, really essential. So I just try to write almost every day. And I find that if I am showing up and doing the work, publishable stuff comes out of the other side of that. It's not always publishable when I sit down to do it, but if I show up every day and do the work, the output tends to take care of itself. So again, do the verb or be the noun. If you're doing the verb, it makes you the noun. If you are acting like the noun, assuming the identity of the noun, as he says in Fight Club, Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.

10:42Welcome to Dublin. And great to see a fellow Iron Maiden fan on stage. I love the shirt, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I have a question about change. OK. So whenever I go into companies, it's normally because they're going through a tough time. And staff members are required to change. The problem is at least 80 % of the companies I go into, staff don't want to change, even if their jobs are on the line. The most difficult, painful thing in the world for them to do is to change their behavior. They'd rather keep doing the same thing over and over again. I know you can't change people. Stoicism is it's how you react to them.

11:15But how do you influence or try to incorporate stoic thoughts in people who are just so stubborn and so set in their ways? Thank you. Yeah, we can't change people, but we can maybe motivate people to change themselves, right? And Mark Struess talks a lot about change in meditations. He says, life is like a river. It's flowing past us. We never step in the same river twice. My favorite bit from him meditating on change is he says, everything in your life came from change. Even birth is change. There was non-being and now being, right? He says, you're afraid of death as if that's not the final form of change.

11:58And so I think sometimes helping people understand that the way things are, the thing they're trying to keep was never stable in the first place. Do you know about the ship of Theseus paradox? There's an ancient paradox about an Athenian ship that was responsible for a major historical victory. And so they preserved it. And, you know, it would get old with time and pieces of it would fall apart. And so they would replace it. And so over the decades and then the centuries, every stick of it is replaced. Is it still the same ship or is it a new ship? And the idea is that everything and every one of us is, that's a metaphor for us.

12:42We're always changing and evolving and growing. In fact, there is, speaking of the War of Independence, there's actually the War of 1812, but it's the same common enemy, the British. The oldest ship in the American Navy, it's still considered an active duty ship. is the USS Constitution. And it still exists. It still floats. I have a piece of it. My son's obsessed with ships. And so I bought him from an antique dealer, a chunk of the hull that they took out in one of the repairs and sold to pay for the repair. So this ship has been, I think it was built in the 1790s. And it's still floating. Obviously, if it hadn't changed, if it hadn't evolved, if they hadn't replaced the things piece by piece, it would have sunk by now.

13:28So change is a necessity. And it's like the Queen's motto was, if things are going to stay the same and things are going to have to change, I think we got to help people understand that this thing they're afraid of, not only is it an unstoppable force that they're powerless to actually prevent, but it's a good thing. And they got where they are because at some point in their life, they were more comfortable with change. They were obviously somewhere else before they came to work at this company. you know so without change where are we going to be that's how i think about it

14:02hey it's ryan thank you for listening to the daily stoic podcast i just wanted to say we so appreciate it we love serving you it's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we've been doing it it's an honor please spread the word tell people about it and this isn't to sell anything i just wanted to say thank you

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