This Is How You Change | What Is Our Duty To Society?

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, into the real world.

0:14Ryan Holiday: This is how you change. Changing habits is hard. It takes willpower. It means discomfort. It means doing some stuff you don't want to do. It means not doing stuff you want to do. Discipline is not exactly an easy virtue. It's not always a fun virtue. But it's wrong to think that change and discipline is about force, that it's about strictness, that it's all about struggle. When we interviewed Dr. Claire Carlisle-Tresh about her award-winning book On Habit, one of the things we asked were for tactics she recommends to people who want to quit a bad habit. And she said there's actually a really important mindset.

0:50Ryan Holiday: She said, the habit is for the moment part of you, And it's essential that you treat it with kindness and gentleness rather than as an enemy or a monster. Otherwise, you turn your own soul or psyche or mind into a battleground. The habit needs to be accepted without being indulged. She said, okay, it's here. It is the present reality, and I would like to change. This is actually shockingly similar to some themes we see in Marcus Aurelius and in meditations. He says, celebrate behaving like a human. In another passage, he talks about how to get back to the rhythm after he's been jarred by circumstances.

1:28Ryan Holiday: Philosophy wasn't just a stern taskmaster to the Stokes. It was also a solace. It was counsel. It was supposed to, as Seneca said, make you a better friend to yourself. Change is hard, but it doesn't mean that you have to be relentlessly hard on yourself, that you have to beat yourself up, that you have to fight yourself. And this is actually something we talk about in the Daily Stoic Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness challenge. It's six weeks of challenges. Yeah, but the challenges are nudging you to be what you're capable of being. Pushing yourself to be better while also not beating on you.

2:08Ryan Holiday: It's fun. It's enjoyable. You like who you are on the other side of it. And I think you're really going to like it. I'd love to have you join us. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com slash habits. We're going to start it on July 21st, so I'd love to see it in there. We're offering a group discount if you enroll with some of your friends. And it's going to be awesome. I don't want you to think about the year is over. I don't want you to think about the person you want to become as being something out of reach. Just get after it. And you can sign up right now for the Daily Stoic Habits for Success Habits for Happiness Challenge.

2:41Ryan Holiday: And get back on track to being that person you want to be. That's what it's all about. And you can sign up right now at dailystoic.com slash habits.

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6:04Ryan Holiday: Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I have got a short break between dates on the tour I've been doing, traveling all around. I'm actually not home. I'm traveling, but this is a family thing. I've got a cool project. I can't tell you about it just yet. I'm going to do something really, really awesome. But if you want to come see me in Minneapolis in August or Chicago or Detroit, that's the 18th, 19th, and 20th. And then in October, I'm going to be in Perth and Sydney and Melbourne and Auckland. Then November, they just added a Nashville date. We've got DC in there, Boston, I think.

6:42Ryan Holiday: Anyways, all that's at dailysoaklive.com. But I wanted to bring you some questions from the conversation that I had in San Francisco for today's Q &A. Thanks to the folks that asked me those. And if you want to ask me a question, come see me in person yourself, dailystokelive.com. Hello. Hello. Thanks so much. That was amazing. I think I speak for all of us here. If you had one word to define you as a human being, what would that word be and why? That's a good question. I don't know. I mean, I guess I would be less interested in my own sort of biased take. My wife's around here somewhere, maybe you can ask her.

7:23Ryan Holiday: You know, trying. How about that? I'm trying. Can you speak to what the Stoic view is on our duty to society, in terms of, say, volunteering, donating blood, putting our efforts out besides just our own internal moral compass? Yes. I think we are put here for other people to serve the common good, as Marcus really said. That's what life is all about. A couple of years ago, I read this article about someone who had done an unprovoked kidney donation. They just gave their kidney to a stranger. And I thought that was unreal. I was like, I've always wanted to do, I want to do something like that. And I was telling my wife that I was going to donate my kidney.

8:03Ryan Holiday: And she was like, what are you talking about? She was like, you've never even donated blood before. And I was like, oh, maybe I should start there. So I do that every, what is it, three months that you can. And there's something about literally watching it flowing out of your arm and going to a blood bank for gunshot victims or people who rush to the hospital. Sebastian Younger wrote this incredible book recently called My Time of Dying, where he didn't know. Just one day he's hanging out with his family and he's bleeding to death internally and he's rushed to the hospital. He's like this close to dying.

8:39Ryan Holiday: And he talks about just what a powerful statement that he says, you know, everyone should vote and give blood. Those are our two basic responsibilities as humans. I think that's a pretty good one. But the idea that the Stoic is community-minded, I think, is worth emphasizing again and again and again, because it's seen so much as an individualistic philosophy, a resigned philosophy, a self-contained philosophy, and it is, which I think is what makes the Stoics uniquely suited to contribute to society because they're not all over the place. They're not messes. They're not trying to be all things to all people.

9:16Ryan Holiday: They know where they can make a difference. And that is one area that we can make a difference. Obviously, the other big one is like, what do you decide to spend your career on? You could take a career that is highly paid but makes the world a worse place or you could choose a career that you think makes a positive difference. And that was a transition I made even in my own life, just thinking like, is this what I want to do with my limited amount of time here? And then I found the thing that I did, right? And so I think these are all the ways that we contribute to society. I would like to know what do you do as a father to instill the stoic virtues to your children?

9:56I have a 12-year-old, and as an adult, I struggle with cultivating my own, I guess, search for the virtues, the stoic virtues. But I think they're very valuable, and especially in these challenging times. I think I would like to know what do you do, and maybe I get inspiration from them.

10:15Ryan Holiday: Yeah, this question of how do we teach our children these stoic values and virtues is the main question that I think every parent is thinking about. you know, obviously my kids love hearing about stoic philosophy for me. It's all about it. Because every kid wants to hear about what their parents do. I try, as I said earlier, I try to model the ideas. I would like them to, even if I'd never spoke about it ever, for them to be able to deduce that this is the philosophy I live by and take seriously. That would obviously be, I think, a main, you know, sort of metric. Could you be convicted of it in a court?

10:54Ryan Holiday: Could people see it from the outside even without hearing me talk about it? And, and, you know, I would say on a good day, yes, on most days, probably not. But it but it's about the trying. I do think that the best way to talk about these ideas is through stories, through the stories we lift up. And then, you know, the examples that we, you know, talk about as cautionary tales, like I'm doing tonight, what I try to do in my books, and then what I try to do as a parent, when I'm trying to teach and show them the world is go to these kind of foundational myths. Like in the ancient world, biography was not about, this person was at this place at this time and actually look at all these, let me disprove, did Washington actually cut down a cherry tree or not?

11:40Ryan Holiday: The obsession, I think, with the factual nuts and bolts of history, I think is something that we've sort of gotten wrong. The purpose of history to me is ultimately moral instruction, like how to be a person, what kind of society do we want to have, where are we trying to go? And so I do try to think a lot about the stories and myths and ideas that we talk about over and over and over again, and then of course that we try to live by as well.