This Is Always The Answer | Robert Greene's 6 Stoic Concepts For A Fulfilling Life

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0:56This is always the answer. It's about being tough. It's about being rational. It's about doing your duty. It's about truth. It's about controlling your passions. That's all stoicism, no doubt. But what is beneath it? What is at the root of it? In meditations, Mark Stavilius says that he learned from Sextus that the core of it all was love. To be free of passion, he said, but full of love. What's fascinating is how similar this is to something that Rich Roll, talking on the Daily Stoic podcast a couple of months ago, said that he heard directly from the Dalai Lama earlier this year. Everyone had prepared questions.

1:32Rich said big questions about life and happiness and transcendence. But Rich said that no matter what the question was, the Dalai Lama's answers always came back to one thing. Here's what he said. Essentially, the answer every time was some version of love, like no matter what alludes you or what aspect of your life feels unfulfilled, the answers that you seek will always be found by exploring the nature of love. Killing or receiving? Both. Just love in its broadest definition, I suppose. And he kept using the metaphor of looking at a mother's love for a child. Like if you struggle to conceptualize or grasp what I'm talking about when I say love, just look to the mother's love of a child or look at an animal's love for its child, like the animal mother, like the cow or the dog or what have you.

2:29That was sort of the repeated refrain over the course of the two days, which on one level is like very reductive and simplistic, but if you kind of step back is actually perhaps the most profound thing that he could share. Of course, the Stoics would agree with this. They weren't unfeeling robots. They didn't stuff things down. They weren't solitary hermits. They were brothers and sisters and husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. They were deeply engaged in their communities. They valued virtue as something practiced in service of others. We should not be aspiring to have no emotion, especially to be free of love.

3:07It's not that the Stoics had no temper or no fear or no moments where their life felt unfulfilled. It's that they tried to replace those emotions with love. They loved their faith. That's what a morfati means. They loved people. They loved every minute they were alive. Love, love, love. That's what's underneath it all. That is always the answer. 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?

3:46That'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. 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.

4:23Becky 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. And 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.

5:03You're going to have failure in life. People are going to hurt you. But that is life. That's what it is. So to resist that, to be angry about that means to not love life itself.

5:18To me, he's one of the great living philosophers of our time, certainly one of the best-selling philosophers of our time. His books have sold millions of copies all over the world. His works have changed the lives of athletes and musicians and world leaders, and he directly changed my life, talking about the great Robert Greene. 48 Laws of Power, Art of Seduction, Mastery, Laws of Human Nature, The Daily Laws. I'm Ryan Holiday. Today, not only have I written a number of books about Stoic philosophy, I've spoken about it to the NBA and the NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders. And in today's episode, I want to give you not just some really genius things from the one and only Robert Greene, but I want to give you Robert Greene talking about Stoic philosophy and some Stoic lessons that he's applied, that you can apply, that connect Stoicism to his work on power and warfare and strategy and human psychology.

6:11The thing that you and I made together, which is the amor fati coin, which is the idea that it's also a Nietzsche phrase of sort of loving everything that happens to you, not resenting it, not fighting against it, not carrying around a grudge or a burden, but sort of embracing it and finding the good in it. Yeah. Where does that fit in with our human nature? Well, it doesn't fit in because it's not natural to us. Our natural frame, our natural starting position is when something bad happens, why me? To feel sort of a grievance, to feel that things aren't fair, to feel that other people aren't giving you what you want or what you deserve.

6:54We start from a position of feeling kind of sorry for ourselves. We deserve more than what we're getting. And so overcoming some of these natural elements in human nature and turning them around and using them for another purpose, another way. And amor fati is very powerful in that you train yourself to accept everything that happens. It's sort of a banality to say that things happen for a reason, but there's some truth to it. For Nietzsche it was, this is life. Life involves pain. Life involves adversity. You're going to die one day and it's not going to be pleasant. Your friends and family members, they're going to die one day and it's not going to be pleasant.

7:36You're going to have failure in life. People are going to hurt you. But that is life. That's what it is. So to resist that, to be angry about that means to not love life itself.

7:51Seneca has this thing, but I still struggle with what it means. He says, we suffer more in imagination than reality. Now, I think he's saying, and I was talking to a friend He's sort of dreading this thing that's going to happen. He's worried about this negative news article that's going to come out. I was talking to him about it and I was saying, look, like it's going to happen and it's going to either be really negative or not that negative. But you're you're borrowing the suffering in advance. You're you're feeling crappy about it before it's happened. I'm just curious. What does that quote mean to you?

8:22I often have the idea as I'm meditating, there's a world out there that has nothing to do with me. It's completely indifferent to Robert Greene. The birds could care less about my fate. The trees don't know anything about my existence. The sky doesn't care at all about me, right? Okay, that's the reality. That's the world. But my thinking creates this thing as if I'm the most important thing in the universe, that everything that happens is going to happen to me and is going to be bad, etc. So to be able to see that thinking traps you so many times into patterns, that you've been programmed to respond to situations, a lot of times by anxiety thoughts pop up about I've got to do this phone call or oh I forgot to email that person or damn with that this this interview is coming up and I don't want to do it so much of the thoughts are are anxieties that you're anticipating right what's going to happen right if you can just control that if you could just see that that that is the source of your problem and that the world is indifferent to you and that the circumstances are totally neutral And that newspaper article that comes out, you can't control it.

9:29And maybe the bad stuff will actually in the end rebound to your favor or it'll make you tougher. It'll make you realize certain things. If you can just see them as facts, then you've got the power. My philosophy has always been you have to make ideas your own. You have to take what somebody teaches and you have to put it into your own experience. It can't just be these dead words that you kind of digest that have no relevance to your daily experience. You have to take them. They have to come to life within you, within your own experience. So you read a passage. It's not maybe what I'm really going through right now, but you kind of maybe recall some experiences in the past that might be relevant.

10:11And then the second day you come about something that is maybe a little bit closer. and then as you go through it more and more and more, that kind of soaks in, and you see more and more access points to your daily experience, and then it can kind of become something that you internalize. Death is the ultimate barrier for all of us, not just physically, but psychologically. I maintain that human beings are messed up, screwed up in so many ways because of their awareness of death and their fear of death. It is through this fear that we created all kinds of superstitions, that we created the idea of an afterlife.

10:53You're enslaved by this fear, you're not aware of it, it's controlling you. Overcoming it is the ultimate freedom. Most people are gonna say, oh that's not me, as they say for all of these chapters. Other people, they're irrational, not me. Yeah, oh I'm not really afraid of death. I play video games and I'm always killing people. I watch movies and people are always dying. I'm not afraid of that. Our culture was permeated with cartoon versions of death. Your death is something physical. It's going to happen to you. It's a very visceral thing. You are afraid of it and that fear creates what I call latent anxiety.

11:30It makes you fearful of a lot of things in life and you're not aware of it. It makes you cautious about failure. It makes you cautious about taking risks. So I'm trying to show you that your fear of death has infected you on many, many levels. And so I compare it to this. I use the metaphor in the book. I don't use many metaphors, but this is one I use, is that death is like this vast ocean that we stand on the shore of. Most animals are not aware of their mortality. We are the only species, as far as we know, that's aware of its mortality. And here you are on the shore of this immense vast ocean.

12:11You don't know what death is or what it's going to be. And you're afraid of it. And you turn your back to it. And we humans have the ability to explore things, to conquer our fear. And I want you, instead of turning your back, to actually enter that vast ocean and explore it. And I show you ways of exploring the actual thought of your own mortality and and how it can free you and inspire you in many ways.

12:38You know who one of the great Stoics of the 20th century was? No. Alfred Hitchcock. Directing a film, if you've known other people who've done it, is an extremely stressful job. It's like directing an army into a campaign because problems are arising that you cannot anticipate. There's all this pressure, there's all this money. You've got insane egos of actors, producers, etc. It's a constant adrenaline rush going through. You can't control your emotions. So Hitchcock, people would look at him on the set and he'd be falling asleep in the director's chair. He'd look like Buddha. His eyes were closed.

13:13Why? Because he prepared for everything. He anticipated everything that was going to happen. And so by the time the film came, he was completely bored because he knew he was able to control every aspect of the production.

13:27What I want to train you, the reader, to look at is to not look at people's what they say or their appearance but to look at their actions and the patterns of their behavior so for instance I talk about Howard Hughes in chapter four as somebody who's got a very weak character who was a horrific businessman and people were lured in by his image of this sort of maverick aviator right kind of you know great Hollywood person etc. But if you looked at the patterns of his behavior, you would have seen that he was actually quite toxic. So stop looking at what people say about themselves and look at their actions.

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