This Will Help You Calm Down | Ask DS

0:28Why choose a Sleep Number smart bed? Big news. Wayfair's Black Friday sale is here. Right now, score up to 80 % off everything home. These are our best deals of the year. Shop Wayfair's Black Friday sale now at wayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. Welcome 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.

1:10Some 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. But thank you for listening. and we hope this is of use to you.

1:32This will help calm you down. If you read the news, it feels like the world is falling apart. Political incompetence, political corruption, rise in crime, depressing economic news. The future looks dark. People seem awful. And worse, it's happening near you. Are you in danger? Should you be scared? Is there really nothing you can do about it? In the hilarious book, In a Sunburned Country, and you can grab a copy at the Painted Porch, it's wonderful, Bill Bryson speaks about the joy of reading the news in Australia, a country many thousands of miles from his own. It always amazes me how seldom visitors bother with the local paper, he writes.

2:09I personally can think of nothing more exciting, certainly nothing you could do in a public place with a cup of coffee than to read newspapers from a part of the world you know almost nothing about. What a comfort it is to find a nation preoccupied by matters of no possible consequence to oneself. I love reading about scandals involving ministers of whom I have never heard, murder hunts in communities whose names sound dusty and remote, features on revered artists and thinkers whose achievements have never reached my ears, whose talents I must take on faith. What he was experiencing, of course, was the wonder of perspective.

2:46He was taking Plato's view, the 10 ,000-foot view, the one that Marcus Aurelius talks about in meditations. Two armies battling each other is a horrible thing up close. From the top of a mountain, it looks like ants going after a piece of food. News near us is alarming, frustrating, disappointing. News from far away is funny, absurd, and riveting. The turmoil of ancient Rome provides us moral lessons. The turmoil of our own time simply makes us queasy. Bryson, who no doubt had problems with politicians at home, noted the hilarity of two feuding Australian ministers who were literally named Abbott and Costello.

3:24The point is how we look at things matters. And sometimes by noticing how we might look at something while we're on vacation or through the lens of a foreign language or culture can give us a better insight into how we might better look at things at home. And by the way, the reason I'm reading Bill Bryson's book on Australia is I'm heading to Australia because on July 31st, I'm doing a talk in Sydney and on August 1st, I'm doing one in Melbourne. I loved the book. We started carrying it the painting board. It's one of my favorites. But anyways, if you want to come see me because you happen to be in that part of the world, you can.

3:57You can grab tickets at ryanholiday.net slash tour. And then I still have to figure out what books I want to read about another part of the world because I'm doing talks in Toronto, Vancouver, London, Dublin, and Rotterdam in November. I'll link to those also. You can come see me at some wonderful venues and ask some questions and all that. Ticket info at ryanholiday.net slash tour. And I can't wait to see all of you there. And I'm very much looking forward to spending a few days in Australia as well.

4:37Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. Back in April, I was at the Naval Academy. I flew there. I was supposed to do this talk to about 1 ,200 sophomores there at the Naval Academy. I was giving this lecture on Jimmy Carter, right actually next to Jimmy Carter Hall there at the Naval Academy. I was talking about the virtue of justice, specifically through the lens of one of their most famous graduates. I was really honored to do it. I'd sort of packed in a hurry the night before, and I grabbed this white pair of vans that I have. They're these zip-up vans that I really like.

5:11I fly in that morning, check into the hotel, prep for the talk. I've never done this talk before. I go for a long run there along the water, get showered, start to get dressed, go to put on my shoes and they don't fit. And I realized my wife and I have the same pair of shoes and I grabbed her pair. My running shoes are disgusting. I definitely cannot run in them. So I have to run up the street there in Annapolis. I'm staying at that waterfront hotel right there if you've ever been. And I have to buy a pair of shoes to put on and walk out with straight to the talk. So I'll bring that talk to you at some point because I was really proud of it.

5:48I think it turned out great. But I had a little Q &A after. That's what I wanted to bring you today. They were some great questions. The midshipmen are always incredible to talk to. And I think you're really going to like this. This was part of the Stutt Ethics Lecture Series at the Naval Academy. Stockdale Center has been a great supporter of my work and of course, stoicism. And so here we go. The first thing they were asking me about was this, how do you adapt to the time you're in, but also stick to your values? How do you know when you're sticking to your values versus leaving them behind?

6:22Yeah, it's tough. I think it would be wonderful if there was some clear step-by-step test or rule. Maybe one way to think about it is like, what's actually the harder thing? What's the harder thing? When we're telling ourselves, oh, this is the expedient thing, oh, this will help me do this in the future, are we actually just fooling ourselves and it's allowing us to get away with not having to do the tough thing? But the decision to wait to be strategic, to build relationships, you know, if that's the tougher thing, maybe that's a way to think about it. But I do think it's important. You know, it can be easy to think, you know, hey, this is going to succeed because it's right.

7:02Or this is an idea whose time it's come. That's not where change typically happens. Right. Usually change, progress, righting old wrongs. You know, it's a knife fight. It's a long, hard slog. And, you know, Carter doesn't just decide, hey, we should do something about the Panama Canal. He has to schmooze all 100 of those senators. He has to convince them. He has to work the press. He has to work the State Department. You know, it's a tough thing. Right. And so I think we want to think about doing the right thing as not just a moral issue, but also an issue of competence, an issue of acumen. And the ability to figure out how systems work and how to get things done is just as important as doing the right thing.

7:57You know, Kennedy gives much more beautiful and inspiring speeches about civil rights. It takes Lyndon Johnson, the so-called master of the Senate, to actually ram those things through. So this tension between knowing what's right and then getting that thing done, that's the competence we have to cultivate. And that takes a lifetime. But it is tough, right? You think about who becomes the CEO of companies, who makes it all the way to admiral or president. it's usually not a disruptive person, right? You get to that level by going along, not in all things, but if you're a radical, if you are disruptive, if you are constantly challenging the status quo, it's going to be hard to get promotion.

8:52It's going to be hard to make friends and fans. That's why Carter has to say, you know, you're not going to like my campaign. This is what I have to say to get elected. But when I'm actually president, I'm going to do it. And I think the problem is most people say to ourselves, that's what I'm doing. But then we get there, we get there, and then suddenly we become risk averse, or we start thinking of the next office. And that's why we don't ultimately do the hard right thing then. Because now we can see, oh, if I stay at this five more years, or I make this or make that, then I'll get to the next level.

9:29Then I'll really be in a position to do good. And so that's constantly delaying the time when you do the hard thing and you never end up doing it because you think you'd become more empowered as you go. But in fact, you become more risk averse because now you have more to lose. Someone asked me to expand on Carter as a campaigner versus a leader because you have to win office to be able to be a leader and the tensions there. Yeah, I think what Carter was talking about, although he didn't run a racist campaign, he had to convince a number of pretty conservative in the lower C sense voters to give him the keys to the governor's mansion.

10:12right and so we see this politically now all the time it's there's the things that one part of your constituency wants to say wants you to say or do and then the cost that comes over here to a different constituency and so it's a it's a tightrope that you're watching you're walking and I think Carter was saying that that you might not see me as a progressive candidate it on these important civil rights issues, but he was saying to them privately, I will do those things once I am in power. What I think is beautiful and inspiring about Carter, again, is that he actually did that. It wasn't just lip service.

10:55I think that tends to be, unfortunately, what leaders say is they tell a lot of different people what they want to hear, and then they just do what they want to do. But he's saying, you know, you can't change policies if you don't win elections. You can't reform or change or update or, you know, do the things that you need to do in a specific spot, in a specific industry, in a specific moment in time, if you don't have power or influence, right? That's what he's talking about. Someone asked me about some pitfalls or flaws in Stoicism, which is a question I think we should think about. Stoicism isn't perfect, and we should critique it and try to ask ourselves questions about where it's working and not working.

11:40Yes, certainly. I actually just did a video on what the Stoics get wrong. The Stoics, like Jimmy Carter, like all of us, we're all products of our time. We can question certain assumptions, but then we all have blind spots. We have things that we don't understand or that we miss. So Stoics lived in a time of slavery. They live in a time of vast inequality. The Roman Empire is a ruthless colonizer and conqueror. These are not great things. The Stoics don't question that. I think Stoicism was primarily a philosophy for people trying to be good inside a not-so-good world, but they could have done more.

12:20They should have done more. I think one area that fascinates me to the Stoics, it's not that they get wrong, but we have to remember we only have some of the surviving writings from the Stoics. We have by no means everything they ever thought and did. But even just this idea that, you know, there's some things that we control and some things that are not in our control. Epictetus says it's either up to you or it's not up to you. Everything else that's not up to you, you don't care about. Well, the reality is there's some things in the middle that we can influence, that we have some control over.

12:53And what about those? And I think that's what I'm talking about even here with Carter, right? He did the right thing, but could he have been better at doing the right thing? Was he ignoring some things that he could have had more influence over? Could he have, you know, greased more palms and schmoozed more and had more drinks with people? Could he have been more effective as a politician? Perhaps maybe he saw that as not in his control, but I think You would argue it was more in his control than maybe he wanted to. So it's not so black and white. There's some things that are up to us. There's some things that are not up to us.

13:27I think it's not a whole. It's just it's an area that requires some nuance, which is there's some stuff that we have influence over. Ultimately, getting promoted is not up to you. But whether you do the right things to put yourself in a position to potentially be promoted or recognized is up to you. And so that distinction is one I think about, not just philosophically, but I think about practically in my personal life. I can write the best book that I can write, and then I hope it succeeds. But there's also things that I can do in between, is what we call marketing, is what we call sales, to hopefully make that more of a reality.

14:05And that is something the Stokes don't talk about enough.

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