This is the Main Thing | Ask Daily Stoic

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 the main thing. There's nothing wrong with success. There's nothing wrong with power. There's nothing wrong with living a nice life with achievement or admiration. Certainly, many Stoics did precisely that. Seneca, Cato, Marcus Aurelius, they were important and well-known. They were admired. They were influential. But you know what? They would have shrugged all that off. They appreciated the success, but it wasn't something they coveted. It may have impressed others, but it wasn't how they defined themselves. The main thing Walter Wade says in Walker Percy's stoicism-inspired novel The Moviegoer, the main thing Binks is to be humble, to make golden fleece and be humble about it.

0:59Ryan Holiday: It might have meant a lot to others, he was saying, but it didn't mean anything to him. That's how we might assume that Marcus Aurelius felt about a lot of what was thrown at him. In fact, one of the lines in Meditations suggests as much, where he says that he measures himself not by how many honors he's received, but how many he's turned down. He didn't make golden fleece, but he did remind himself that the purple cloak of the emperor was nothing more than an ordinary one dyed by shellfish blood. Clearly, he still tried to do things. Clearly, he was still active in the world. He just measured himself by his humility, by his indifference, more than he did by his achievement or status.

1:38Ryan Holiday: And so must we. We can still try to climb the ladder of success. We can be powerful. We can live a nice life. The main thing, though, is to do this and be humble even so. Humble even if you have achieved an impressive amount, even if you have done many impressive things.

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4:15Ryan Holiday: I had a crazy 36 hours or so back in February. Took my kids to school, went for a nice run around Town Lake, took a shower, went to the airport, flew to Las Vegas, drove about 45 minutes outside Las Vegas, gave a talk at a hotel at, I don't know, seven o 'clock, finished at eight, went straight to the hotel room, changed into some slightly more comfortable clothes. And then I drove, I drove from Vegas to Phoenix. They told me it would be like four hours. It was like five hours. And there's also a time change in there. So I got in at like two in the morning, I crashed. And then I had to get up at, I don't know, 7am.

4:53Ryan Holiday: I gave a talked to the Chicago Cubs, then I talked to the Arizona Diamondbacks. Then I had a talk to you guys, to Daily Stoic fans at a theater in Phoenix. Actually, my parents came. Then we had dinner after I crashed, woke up at like 5 a.m., flew home in time to take my kids to see a Harry Potter live orchestra thing. That was more than 36 hours, I think. I don't know. I can't keep track. I couldn't keep track of it at the time. It was crazy, but it was lovely. I got to do basically four talks in 24 hours. I got to see a bunch of you. And it was also prep for a busy summer and fall that I have coming up.

5:32Ryan Holiday: I'm going to be in Portland and San Francisco in June, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Detroit in August. And then in October, I'm going to be all over Australia and New Zealand. You can come see me, dailystoiclive.com. But in today's episode, I wanted to bring you some of the Q &A that the people in Phoenix asked me. I think you'll like that. And hopefully it's a nice little preview of a conversation we might be able to have there in Australia or California or Oregon or Illinois or Minnesota or Michigan, wherever you want to come see me. I will see you there soon. All right, let's get into it.

6:19How will the Stoics confront something like grief, like this very big, all-consuming... It doesn't pass if it comes back. Yeah. Well, it sounds like you're going through something, too. So that sounds like our first question, so I'm sorry. I think what we can say they would not do is shrug it off or say that it's nothing or you would never feel it. That's, again, the stereotype of the stoics. And we know this because, and I'll just point you to this, because it's better than any answer I give you. Seneca writes three incredibly moving essays on Greek. They're actually called his Consolation series.

7:01One of them is Consolation to his mother after he's been exiled, and she's devastated. And he's writing to both reassure her, but you can tell he's really trying to reassure himself. He writes to the daughter of a friend of his who is grieving her father, who's devastated by grief. And I'm forgetting who the other one is for. But Seneca, the stoic philosopher, the philosopher that's supposed to not be affected by things or ravaged by emotions or whatever, three of his best writings are only about dealing with this fundamentally devastating and overwhelming thing. He's saying, you know, you don't shrug it off.

7:39There are ways to think about it, there's ways to process it, there's ways to deal with it, but it's also a part of life. It's the one thing we all have in common, because we all have that other thing in common, just that we're mortal. Hey Ryan. Yes? So I've seen your crazy stack of Lincoln books, and just trying to figure out, are there any helpful hints for how to read more, how to read lots, how to speed read, how do you do it all? Okay, so it's important that everyone realize that speed reading is a scam. There's almost nobody who reads a lot, no people who read a lot of books spend a lot of time reading, and And they spend a lot of time reading because reading is hard and to do it well and to spend time on it.

8:34But also people who like reading like spending time reading. And so why would I try to rush through it as fast as possible? Name another pleasure that you try to get over as quickly as possible.

8:49So I spend a lot of time reading. I think about it as my job, right? And it is. My job is I own a bookstore and I write books. But I spend a lot of time reading because it makes my life better and it's one of the highest ROI activities that I have. And by ROI, I mean professional and personal. It makes me better as a human being, makes me better at my job, and also is enjoyable and lovely and makes me happy. So I spend a lot of time viewing it. Should you spend as many hours as I spend reading books about living? Probably not. I can give you one or two and save you the trouble. But that's what I love doing.

9:26Like, nothing gets me more excited than finding out there's, like, a thousand big look about something I'm really interested in. It's written by someone who's an amazing writer. And so that's what I love doing. But, yeah, I spend a lot of time doing it. And I will say, though, that the more time we spend reading, particularly about a singular subject, that is the only way I have found to read faster. Like, if you want to read faster, know a lot about the topic you're reading about. that is one way to read faster because you're not like, wait, what is that? You're not stopping to look things up.

10:00You're not going to do, you understand where this is going and you can speed up a little bit. But other, there's really no way to read faster other than by doing the work of having read a lot about this subject. And it's good work and it's worth it. So you mentioned earlier with the question about how to actually get disciplined that you want to start small. Something that really helped me was to just think about the next five seconds and think, okay, in five seconds What would I be really happy about if I did it right now? Oftentimes just like get up take a deep breath, fix your posture, something like that and that starts to change the next things to do.

10:34That really ties into how like you said like there's always more before you count them, but in the face of like uncertainty about uncertainty where you're not really sure how to do the counting What kinds of things would stoic say about how to get started doing that when it's not even clear how to plan and the tools that you have to plan aren't really, there's no clear precedent on what to do. So you're saying what do you do when you don't know what to do? Is that a request? How do we try to make a plan to do what we don't know what to do when we don't know how to make that plan in the first place?

11:04I have a magic trick for you. Take a lot of walks. Maybe the single best thing you could possibly do to think better, to think more clearly, to get that sort of philosophical view, that perspective. I try to take a walk every single day. We found this dog on the side of our road and dumped it and my kids assured me that it would do the walking. I fell for that lie. But like, I take the dog for a walk, but really the dog is taking me for a walk. And really the dog is allowing me to do my thinking, right? To get that perspective. to review the day or to prepare for the day. I think human beings were designed to think on the move, right?

11:51One of the oldest evidences that we have of human beings on this continent are footsteps in White State National Park of somebody traveling as their young child, probably a woman carrying a kid, and that walk there on their path is crisscrossed by giant sloth tracks and all these species that don't exist anymore. Like that's what we were evolved to do, to travel long distances. And I think that's, there's something about walking and kind of jogging. So to me, my philosophical and meditative practice is inseparable from my walking practice. And when I'm jammed up writing or frustrated or pissed off, I take a walker.

12:32It usually makes whatever that next small thing a little bit clearer. It's a well-known, back in my house, that no one's allowed to talk to me after I get back from a runner walk the first couple of minutes is there's stuff I gotta write down. Don't lose it, don't say it. I just want to say this is my introduction to Stoicism. So I want to say thank you. You're welcome. Yeah, I enjoyed it very much. Thank you. What I picked up from, there's a lot of information, but what I picked up and the biggest lesson kind of what I learned is focus on what you can control and act on it and correct me if I'm wrong on that.

13:08Yeah. But the first thing I kind of thought of when I was thinking of that is where is the line drawn between what you can and what you can't really control? Because if you start to overthink it, which I definitely was, the lines seem to get a little blurred. Yeah. I was just wondering. I wish there was a hairy, clear line between what was in our control and what is it. I mean, there's some stuff that's obviously not in our control,

13:33Ryan Holiday: weather or wind, river, or all of our stuff, things like that. But there is a middle ground that Stoic writers have talked about for a very long time. There's that middle gray area of stuff we have some influence over. And if you are super literal about what's in your control and what's not in your control, you can sort of neglect things that, Hey, there's a probability of doing it if you do X Y and Z it could have this impact So there is some some gray area there I wish there was a you know a clear bug it was this this side and this side It's it's more complicated than not but I think first and foremost We have to sort of stipulate that there's a bunch of stuff that's outside our control We spend a lot of time and energy Upset about those things trying to change those things blaming people for those things wishing those things or otherwise and that's all energy that could be spent on the other stuff.

14:32Ryan Holiday: Hey, 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 of 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.

14:58Thank you.