This is What A Life Well-Lived Looks Like | Ask Daily Stoic

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1:18Welcome 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 who are 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.

1:58This is what a life well lived looks like. He lived for a century, the longest living president in American history. That in and of itself, though, doesn't tell us anything. Seneca's line was that it's not how long you live, but how well you live that matters. And he was pointing out that many people live to be old, but have little to show for it. Jimmy Carter, on the other hand, had a lot to show for his nine decades. The reviews of his presidency might be mixed, although that's unfair. This is a man whose term was without wars, without corruption, which first addressed climate change, mandated seatbelts in cars, returned the Panama Canal to its rightful owners, and struck a historic peace deal for the Middle East.

2:47But his time as an ex-president is unquestioned. question. After he left office, Carter founded the Carter Center to promote global health, democracy and human rights, earning him a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. In particular, Carter was relentless in his efforts to eradicate the guinea worm. At a press conference in 2015, Carter famously said, I'd like for the last guinea worm to die before I do. When he started working on the problem, the disease afflicted more than 3.6 million people a year in 21 countries. At the end of 2022, there are just 13 cases in four countries. Beyond wiping out diseases, he acted as an international mediator in North Korea, Haiti, and other nations.

3:31He was an active volunteer focusing particularly on housing for the poor, still personally building houses into his 90s. He wrote numerous books on a variety of subjects, from policy to his personal life and even poetry, eventually winning a Pulitzer Prize. He enjoyed a 77-year marriage to his beloved Rosalind, the foundation for my entire enjoyment of life, Carter once said. And together they had four children and 22 grandchildren and great grandchildren. In short, it was a life of service and a life of virtue, not virtue in the pious judgmental sense, but in the stoic sense, active in public life, active in the world, equal parts compassionate and muscular, a man in command of himself as well as others.

4:22We've written about Carter quite a bit over the years. He comes up repeatedly in my book, Right Thing Right Now, on The Daily Dad, and he is one of the best stories in Discipline is Destiny. And with his recent passing, I wanted to reflect on some simple lessons from Jimmy Carter on how to live a good and honorable life. The first is always do your best. In an interview with Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear Navy, after Carter proudly said he was ranked 59th in a class of 840 at the Naval Academy, instead of being impressed, Rickover just looked at him and asked, but did you always do your best?

4:59And Carter answered honestly that he did not always do his best. And after a long pause, Rickover asked, why not? And then walked out of the room. And Carter would never forget this question. It became the lodestar of his life. Hang in there. In the 1930s and 40s, the Black midshipmen accepted to the Naval Academy all left before graduating because of appalling racism. Wesley Brown was on the brink of leaving when Carter, who was two years ahead, caught him walking down the hallway after some particularly discouraging exchange, threw his arm around him and said, hang in there. Because Carter grew up in a small, rural, segregated town in Georgia, he was expected to be racist.

5:40And so one classmate recalled he was treated as if he was a traitor. Carter, who ran cross-country with Brown, took it in stride. And Brown would hang in there and become the first African-American graduate of the Naval Academy in 1949. And the school's athletic center is now named after him. Make time every day for study and reflection. Even when he was president, Carter blocked out an hour in the mornings for reading, thinking, and prayer. Don't be all about business. As he was setting up his administration in the White House, Carter told the ambitious staff, we are going to be here a long time, and all of you will be more valuable to me in the country with rest and a stable home life.

6:20You only have one life to live. Make the most of it. Carter said that's what drove him. He said, I feel like I have one life. I feel like God wants me to do the best I can with it. And that's quite often my major prayer. Let me live a life so that it will be meaningful. From his mentor, Admiral Rickover Carter picked up this idea, not just of doing your best, but doing what was right. It is impossible for me to delay something that I see needs to be done, Carter once said. And this was an attitude that likely cost him a second term. In fact, it was said that the surest way to get on Carter's bad side was to claim something would be bad for his reelection prospects.

6:58It is, of course, sad to hear of Carter's passing. On the other hand, no one can say that he was taken from us too soon. Certainly, he left nothing undone. This man got more time on the planet than any other American president, but much more impressively, he did more with his time. And we can say unequivocally that this man lived. It was the honor of my life, or one of the honors of my life, to give a speech about Carter to the Naval Academy, which up until I think last year, the year before, did not have a building named after him. So I spoke right across from what is now Carter Hall, and I gave a speech on the four virtues and the ways in which Carter embodied them.

7:40I think that's up on YouTube. I'll link to that in today's show notes, or maybe we'll even run it as a podcast episode. In the meantime, what an incredible man, a hero of mine, someone that we could all use, not just to study more, but to follow more. And I'll leave it there. Rest in peace. Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove in Austin and bought a truck.

8:18What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck.

9:00Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course. Because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast.

9:40Back in August, I went to Brazil. Not very long. It was a insane trip. Here, let me actually pull this up because it was nuts. I was in Brazil for like six hours. I flew from Austin to Atlanta, Atlanta to Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo to Belo Horizonte. I landed and gave a talk five hours later and then went literally immediately from the talk to the car, to the airport and flew home. I was gone. Let's see. I left Austin at five o 'clock on a Thursday and I was home by 1.30 PM on a Saturday. So it was a crazy exhausting trip. I got a lot of reading done and I was working on the manuscript of the wisdom book.

10:34So it was not all lost. Plus I got to talk to one of the biggest audiences that I've ever talked to. There was like 4 ,000 people there. This was the Hotmart Fire Conference in 2024. It was the largest digital marketing, entrepreneurship, and innovation conference in Latin America. It was a crazy crowd. And then afterwards, I got to answer some questions through a translator. And the craziest thing was, as I'm walking through the airport on the flight home right after the venue, I see they have the Gregory Hayes translation of meditations in the airport. I was like, oh, that's cool. It's like the one with the bird on it and the feather.

11:08And I thought, oh, let me go check that out. I wonder if that's in Portuguese. I walk up to it and it says my name on the cover. My blurb about what I've written about meditations, like in an article or something, is what's on the cover of this book. So it was pretty incredible. I bought a copy. I have it in my office now. But anyways, after the event, I did a little Q &A with some of the people there, not all 4 ,000 people because they needed a translator. It was a nice little chat and that's what we're going to get into now. So the first question was someone was asking, how do I share something like stoicism that's been around for thousands of years in a modern way?

11:45And obviously, I think a lot about this because it's what I do. Yeah, I mean, it's easy in the sense that you're not having to create something new. I think most wisdom is old wisdom. And most great stories are old stories. There's some argument that there's only like five or six stories ever. There's just different archetypes of those stories. So what I try to do, instead of trying to invent something new, instead of trying to act like I'm the genius, I want to find what the great minds of history and antiquity have said, what's been actually proven in real life experience over the intervening centuries.

12:24And then I just want to find new ways of putting it together. So my books, I see as a new way of doing it. For instance, the Daily Stoic is the first time that all the Stoics were ever in one book and that you would consume it one page a day. And then I said, okay, this is a great idea for a book and it's working as a book, but what if some people don't want to carry this book around? What if it was delivered by email every day? And then we said, okay, what's a video version? What's a podcast version? We're just extending it out into all these new ways that people consume information. So I think a lot of the best art is really a rephrasing or reimagining of something that's already resonated or inspired or connected with people.

13:04And you're just finding a new, new characters, new ways, a new spin on, on putting that together. Obviously other people can do other things. That's just kind of how I think about it. And then somebody else asking along those lines is asking, how do marketers think about creating content and all the different ways that it's possible to reach an audience in that modern world? It seems like a lot more than it is. You think, okay, there's 10 different networks or mediums that you're publishing in. So if you're doing, you come up with 10 pieces of content, that's a hundred pieces right there, right?

13:42So it gets big pretty quickly, but the reality is everyone knows this. Like most advertising is totally worthless. It doesn't make an impact. Companies are just lighting money on fire. They make really boring ads that don't resonate with anyone. And most of them are not even seen, right? So knowing, coming from the advertising world, just knowing it's a really hard thing to be really good at, I thought, okay, so if I'm going to do advertising, I'm going to have to spend a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of creative bandwidth, and a lot of money to do it well. And I thought, but what's the opportunity cost of that?

14:16What if I spent that time and energy and passion and budget on stuff that I actually cared about? What would that look like? And what if I gave lots of value away and I knew that that would create a relationship where you could capture a small percentage of that value and the people who are paying would be glad to pay and the vast majority of people would be getting it for free. Like, isn't that an ideal scenario that you make tons of stuff that reaches lots of people and that's subsidized by your hardcore group of people who don't mind and can afford it? That's like, to me, an ideal scenario.

14:55So I just decided to direct my time and energy that way. I have a podcast editor and a social media person and I have a video editor and I have copy like I like the people on that team and I like that it provides them a livelihood and that we're all trying to take this thing that we care about this philosophy and come up with interesting ways to give it to people that just strikes me as like a better canvas for time and energy than like how can I trick people into clicking these ads you know which is then designed to trick them into buying something. That's just what I decided to focus time and energy on.

15:34And it's been, it's been awesome. And I, what I think about is like, my main thing is, it's really important. Like, what is, what is the thing that only you can do as a creator? Like, what's the main thing that the creator can do that put you in this position to begin with? And for me, that's writing books. So I spend the vast majority of my time doing that. And then the team that I have, their job is to help me translate that stuff in a way that's not time consuming for me, you know, that doesn't consume my life, basically, that allows me to translate the stuff that I make into these different mediums.

16:10So I write a book, and then the team helps break that down into articles, into Instagram carousels, into tweets, into podcast episodes like that. And then someone else asked if I could tell the story about how I was first introduced to the Stokes, how it came to be that this book that I read in my college apartment, I would find myself not just on the cover of in Brazil almost 20 years later, but, and I don't think I'm breaking any news here. I wrote a new forward to that edition, which should be coming out in March. Yeah, it's funny. I was at a conference like this when I was in college. It had this sort of small Q &A after, and there was a speaker and I just went up to them after and I asked them what books they were reading.

16:53And they told me they were reading with Stoics. I didn't know who they were or what that was. And I went and I bought it, and it just sort of took me down this whole rabbit hole that changed my life. I didn't start writing and publishing about Stoic philosophy for many years later. It was just something that I was understanding and interested in and trying to apply in my own life. So it was a bit of a journey that way. And again, it seemed crazy that you could make a living talking about philosophy in the 21st century. So that took me a while to get there. That's what's so powerful about books and movies and art is like, you make something and then it can take on this life of its own and people recommend it.

17:32There's a passage at the beginning of Marcus Rios' Meditations, the first book of the Stoics I read, where he thanks one of his teachers for loaning him a copy of Epictetus, another Stoic philosopher. So this has been happening for thousands of years. People find something good and they go, hey, you should check this out. It worked for me. And that's kind of what I am trying to continue with my work. So that was me talking at the Hotmart Festival in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. It's always fun to talk. I wish I'd gotten more time in this lovely city, but I've been to Brazil a bunch and I'm sure I will be back again.

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