This Too Is Always Yours (And Can’t Be Taken) | Ask Daily Stoic

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0:55This too is always yours and can't be taken. There has always been fear, fear that tyrants or fate would take something away from us. The ancients worried about being sent into exile. They worried that disease would kill someone they loved. They worried an earthquake could swallow up their house. And these were reasonable worries. Marcus Aurelius buried multiple children. Lusonius Rufus was sent away multiple times. Pompeii disappeared under a volcano. Today, these worries remain with us and they remain real. A vindictive politician can take away your livelihood. A senseless virus can take away your parents.

1:35A hurricane or a forest fire could wipe your neighborhood off the map. In this way, we are all vulnerable. In this way, we are all, to borrow a phrase from Joan Didion that sounds like it came from Seneca, hostages to fortune. And yet there is something that can't be taken from us by even the strongest strongman or the most unlucky of external events. Nothing can take from us what we have had. No one can take this present moment from us because in the attempt, the present moment becomes the past. What we have right now, that is ours, not just now, but forever. And what are we doing with it? Not using it, but worrying about it.

2:15We have our family right now. We have our job right now. We have the dream house right now. We have it in our minds forever, too. The memories we made there, the things we accomplished, the love we felt. Let us not let it waste away. Let us not be afraid.

2:35Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Back in February, I took a long flight from Austin, I guess, to New York, New York to Abu Dhabi. I think that's how it was. Anyways, I was in the UAE and I was talking to this marketing group and I opened with this story of Zeno. And basically, I was saying that right across the Arabian Peninsula from where we were, there was this guy named Zeno who had suffered this shipwreck. And I was saying that, look, just on the other side of this bit of land here in the Mediterranean, this new way of thinking emerges.

3:22And I was trying to emphasize the connection between the East and West, although the East and West were often in conflict in those days. Zeno living in the shadow of the Persian Wars, Socrates having lived and fought in them. And yet it's this fascinatingly fertile bit of land, fascinatingly distinct and divergent ways of thinking. And yet they share so many interesting similarities. And now I'm back, but on the other side of the peninsula. I am recording this from a balcony. My kids are getting ready for bed and I'm going to go in and put them down in a second. You can hear little motorcycles and cars zipping down below me.

4:10I am looking out at the sea surrounding Ithaca. That's where I'm recording this from. And I'm thinking about where I was not too long ago. And I wanted to bring you some of the questions that came up after that talk. I think you're really going to like it. They were fascinating questions. Anyways, I'll bring you that. And then I'll bring you another chunk of this next week. So I'll talk to you all soon.

4:36Thanks 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 into Austin and bought a truck. What 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.

5:21We 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. Toyota 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.

6:00Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. Hi. Hello. So I would like to know how modern leaders could advise POIC principles without coming across as desattached. Obviously, you have to understand that other people feel things. Other people are worried about things. Other people are not also as strong as you. right that's one of my favorite quotes in meditations he says uh tolerant with others strict with yourself and so understanding even like this virtue of discipline which runs through stoicism it's actually the virtue of self-discipline so it's not about being unfeeling and being strict and being you know a hard ass to other people those are things you can decide to hold yourself to but with others we want to be empathetic we want to be understanding we want to communicate, you want to help them, you want to care about them.

7:01We don't necessarily expect that in return, especially if you're in a position of leadership. That's your job. Their job is not to provide that for you. You've got to go get it somewhere else. And so I would kind of think about it that way. It's just like, do we want a leader to feel what we're feeling, or do we want the leader to help us solve the problems that we have? If we're freaking out, we don't want to look up at the person who's in charge. And we're not going to be reassured that they're freaking out also. We want them to be calm. We want them to be focused on solutions. And then conversely, when things are going awesome, we're crushing it and the market's never been better, we want the leader to be thinking about what's happening next, not to be irrationally exuberant and telling themselves it's because they're a genius and it's always going to be this way.

7:53So I think the job of the leader is to be calm and rational and collected. And that might feel a little bit like a little bit detached, but there is a remove in leadership. They're supposed to be in their own space. Hi. What are your views on ambition and contentment? Look, obviously, ambition is good for the bottom line. It's good for humanity. It can be, it can be happiness for the individual. There's some balance there. One of the ways I've started to think about this is I'm very ambitious as a writer, but I'm less ambitious as an author. So like I'm trying to be the best that I'm capable of being, because that's very much in my control.

8:43And I'm less ambitious about what other people say or think or different benchmarks, right? Like I'm focused on doing what I can do as opposed to winning awards or getting attention. And what I found though is that by focusing on one, it actually results in the latter versus when I'm focused on the other part, I'm actually often collecting this part. So I kind of think about it that way, that the Stoics were saying that if your ambition is tied to things that are in your power, that's safe. If your ambition is about winning the approval or the affection or the attention of someone else, well, you better hope you get it because if you don't, you're going to be disappointed.

9:27You've deprived yourself of the ability of just being able to take pride in a job well done, pride in process, pride in all that. So obviously we have to move the numbers or the business goes under. But I think as the individual, we want to go, hey, you know, am I attaching myself to, you know, what other people say or do, or am I focused more on what I say or do? And I think one is both more filling and moves the needle more. What is your relationship with selecting methods and how does that change over time at Huffington? We sort of replicate that. So I was a research assistant for an amazing writer named Robert Green, who I think has been out there before.

10:11And I started in a world before AI. I had to transcribe his interviews because there wasn't computer software that could magically do that. And so I spent many, many years doing sort of mundane and difficult tasks. But what I was learning in the process was how those work, how storytelling works, how research works. I was getting this base of knowledge. Plus, I was developing relationships and all these different things that ultimately helped me in what I wanted to do. And I was just learning, you know, this is what a professional does. This is what it looks like. So Robert's been probably the most influential mentor in my life and sort of remains so.

10:51I mean, someone I still ask advice from all the time. I think as you go on, that relationship can become a bit more reciprocal. although I would say you can't really pay your mentors back but you have to pay it forward to someone else and that's where that kind of link that we were talking about earlier goes one of the parts of that Seneca talks about how we learn as we teach so even in taking the things that I learned from Robert passing them on to my research assistants now I'm learning from them in a new way like in having to repeat that and then I'm learning from the people that I mentor so Robert's probably my number one mentor in that part I would say, though, I don't think your mentor just has to be someone that you know or works for.

11:35I think that's what books are. It's a way to immerse yourself and get access to people that you would never ordinarily get to meet. So I think you have all different types of mentors, but there is something very special about that sort of in-person, day-to-day, being able to ask questions, being able to watch them model those traits for you. I think it's very hard to get good at something about that.

12:00Hey, 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.

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