This Is Always There | Ask DS

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1:42Welcome 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. Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

2:24This is always there. Every retail business knows about shrinkage, the percentage of goods shoplifted or stolen off the floor. Every manufacturer knows how to calculate their defect rate because no production run is perfect. Every shipping company knows there will be an error rate, a delivery failure rate, even a disappeared into thin error rate. Every credit card processor knows about fraudulent purchase rates and disputed charges. And the bigger the business, the larger these numbers are, certainly in terms of cost. It's frustrating. It's expensive. It's also a fact of life. Marcus Aurelius writes that a world without obnoxious people is impossible.

3:05And a patient and wise person comes to understand that when they meet someone obnoxious, they are simply a percentage of the whole. And so it goes in business. The entrepreneur, the leader, the accountant comes to accept that a certain amount of goods will be stolen. A certain amount will break. A certain amount will be lost. Just like we do at Daily Stoic with the products that we make and sell, you try to minimize the losses as best you can, but you will never get it to zero. Mistakes, theft, random acts of God, these are taxes and tolls, operating expenses. And as Seneca said, we must learn to pay these taxes and pay them, as Seneca said, of all the taxes in life gladly and without complaint.

3:45It's madness to sweat every screw up, to get angry at every incurred fee or replacement, to take any of it personally. It's to torture yourself and the people who work for you. You have to accept it. You have to practice what the Stokes call the art of acquiescence for a reasonable amount of it. You have to focus on growing the business as a whole. In fact, understanding that as you grow the business, the shrinkage and defect and failure and fraud increases alongside it. Such is life. We must pay its corresponding taxes.

4:33Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to a Q &A episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. This was back in may I was flying trying to get to knoxville tennessee I was supposed to land in nashville and drive a couple hours to knoxville Ended up being crazy weather We circled for like an hour ended up landing in memphis Then we're supposed to wait a bunch of time To then get on a flight and I was like, you know what? I don't trust it I don't think it's gonna happen. I called my speaking agent. I said just give me a rental car. I'm gonna drive I drove like six hours in the same storm and made it at like two in the morning to Knoxville.

5:14And then I got up early that day. I went for a run and then I went over and I talked to the entire Tennessee athletic department about the connection between stoicism and sports. I'll bring you the whole talk in a little while. But in today's episode, I wanted to do the Q &A that I had with some of the coaches. There were tennis coaches there. The head football coach was there. The swimming coach was there. admissions officers, a whole bunch of people in the athletics department were all there as part of a coach's retreat. And they asked some really interesting questions, which I wanted to bring to you in today's episode.

5:48So enjoy.

5:55We have time for some questions. Want to do some questions? So you mentioned all the other things, stoicism that obviously you put your life after. when you were looking at different philosophies, what motives led you to that and what was maybe other words you considered? Yeah, I mean, I think you take from any school, any tradition, any way of thinking if it makes you better, right? They're all dead. They don't have any claim to how it has to be. It's not a dogma. Seneca talks about, he says, read like a spy in the enemy's camp. He says, I'll quote a bad author if the line is good. So I try to take from any and all school, from any and all traditions.

6:35What I like about Stoicism is that I think, again, a lot of philosophy is about up here. And if you live up here, that's great. But if you have a job that's down here in the real world, I want to rely on a philosophy that has been proven on the battlefield, in the arena, in life. And what I find fascinating and cool about the Stoics is that they were real people who were doing real things in real life, and the philosophy was helping them in that. So I think that's why I get excited about it, why it's interesting to me is, you know, they would say acta non verba, deeds not words. Like, how does it actually work in practice?

7:23What do the lives of these people look like? And I think stoicism passes that test pretty well. Yes?

7:37Yes.

7:42Yes, definitely. Just counting your breath is such a great way to do it. You know, it forces you. You can't do anything else as you just count the inhales and the exhales. That's obviously a good one. Usually I find I think hobbies are a great way to do if I'm super distracted, if I need to get out of my head, I do something that I have to lock into, whether that's go for a run or a swim or a bike ride or whatever. Um, the other thing, uh, for me is, um, I, I just try to remind myself, like, is this helping or not? Right. And I think so often, like we're having this huge conversation in our head about this thing that might or may not happen, or we're worried about this and going like the other people are not thinking about this at all.

8:28This is like a one way, uh, thing I'm inflicting this on myself. Is the anxiety making the plane come faster or slower? Is it going to change the course of the storm? You know, I think so often we're kind of borrowing suffering or borrowing trouble by, you know, thinking about things that they're just going to happen or not, right? Politics, right? It's like somebody will get selected as the nominee and then you'll have a choice in November, right? I'm not saying that politics don't matter, but I'm saying like, are you going to vote in November of next year, yes, great. Okay, then you don't need necessarily to be watching CNN every single minute and scrolling to it, like cross that bridge when you come to it, watching it or following it in real time or, you know, emoting about it every, you know, this isn't helping you and it's not helping the situation.

9:21And in fact, there are a bunch of things that you probably could do that would make a difference that could be socially constructive and you're choosing not to do those because it's not only easier, but it's like you're addicted to watching, you know, on whatever side you're on, watching it unfold on television or social media or whatever. Yeah. I love what you said about ego is the enemy, but in college athletics right now, where we're going, it's completely the opposite. What are some of the factors that are things we could say to our athletes that help them understand that? Yeah, I mean, look, ego is obviously a timeless problem.

10:03All the Greek plays and the Shakespearean tragedies, at the core of them, it's all hubris and ego and entitlement and selfishness that leads to it. So it's always been a problem. And then I think social media and culture and the collapse, let's say, of some of the old values, it just exacerbates. It makes it better. But I think what I try to do is what I try to do in the books, what I try to do in my own life, is that the reason we study these kind of cautionary tales is that the reason that the plays and the literature and the movies are about it is to warn us, like, hey, you're going down a bad route.

10:37So I think studying those things is really important. And sometimes, you know, you can tell people, hey, don't do that. That's bad. They're not going to listen. And writing the rule is like show, don't tell. And I try to not only just model the stuff in my own life, but then like when I am trying to convince someone or convey the importance of a point, I try to pick salient examples that demonstrate that ideal that just sort of plant a seed. Oh, hey, I'm being like so-and-so in this situation. That's probably how I would think about it. But I think generally, you know, it's easy in the short term often in an organization, in a team or whatever, to make exceptions or allowances for ego because it's getting results in the short term, right?

11:23A non-sports example, Uber was a great example of this, one of the fastest growing companies in history. they recruited exclusively what they called like rock stars, like the badasses, the people that were the best at what they did, even though those people were often problematic or jerks or assholes or worse, right? And so in the short term, it made them grow very quickly. But it was setting up future lawsuits, setting up future embarrassing scandals. It also made it very hard. It's like, you know, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Those people were only good in a certain type of economic environment or a certain growth trajectory of the company.

12:03And then when the company needed something else, those people didn't have that toolkit. And so I think the important part for a leader, for a coach, for an organization is go like, what are the values? Who are we? What do we stand for? What do we allow? What do we not allow? And then you have to have the strength. You have to have the sort of fortitude to be like, we don't make exceptions for that even when, you know, everyone else wants this person, right? Sometimes we don't know what we want, so we just want what other people want. And like when someone comes on the market or when there's some trend, even when it's in contradiction to what we know is best for the long-term prospects of the culture, and it very rarely works out, you know, or it seems cheap now, but the bill comes due later.

12:50Thank you all very much. Appreciate it. Thank you.

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