Tim Ferriss on Making Better Decisions and Solving Problems (Pt 1)

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0:54I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods. and we get all our groceries for the week. Then we have dinner. It's one of their favorite things to do. It's one of my favorite things to do. And then my wife loves it because she doesn't have to take care of it. This holiday season, whether you're a guest or hosting the big dinner Whole Foods Market has what you need to delight everyone at your table. They even have heat and eat sides from the prepared foods department. You can make Whole Foods your one-stop shop. Everything follows Whole Foods Market's strict ingredients standards so you know it'll be delicious and good for you.

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1:41Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

2:33Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It's pretty unreal to me. 15 years ago, I was in this town, Austin, Texas. I was just a, I guess a college sophomore trying to make my way as a research assistant, aspiring writer person. And I was here at South by Southwest, one of the first events, conferences I've ever been to in my life. And I met this guy and he was an entrepreneur. He was thinking about doing a book. He was presenting later that day or the next day and he invited us to come. And I went, I saw him get up there and give an incredible presentation.

3:16I just thought this dude is going to be huge. And he did go on to be huge. One of the best-selling authors of the last 15 years. One of the great investors of that period also. And a guy who's been my friend throughout all of that. A mentor, advisor, teacher, and just all around great dude. I'm talking about Tim Ferriss, who I have known or has known me since I was, like I said, in college. So this is really cool for me. I had Tim on the podcast back during the pandemic. We chatted remotely and I wanted to have him out to the studio when he was in town. And he came out to the bookstore, which I'll tell you about in the next episode.

3:57And I'm going to split this up into two. I'll tell you about Tim's relationship with the bookstore a little bit because I think it's pretty cool. And we talk about it in the episode. But Tim is a multi-time, five-time, number one New York Times bestselling author. The 4-Hour Workweek, Tools of Titans, The 4-Hour Chef, For Our Body. Just a great, great writer. His books have changed me so much. It's funny, his bio calls him the Oprah of audio. But I think I may have coined that phrase in a piece that I wrote about him many years ago. I think I was the fourth guest on the Daily Stoke podcast because Tim published The Obstacle is the Way as an audio book.

4:43I'll tell you more about that in the other intro too. I just want to get into this intro. If you haven't listened to the Tim Ferriss podcast, you absolutely should. Amazing interviews over the years. Some of my favorite authors. I really liked his episode with Michael Lewis many years ago. That's a favorite. He was one of the first people to have Arnold Schwarzenegger on. And I'm really excited that he came out. I think we had an awesome conversation. You can follow him on social, at Tim Ferriss and at T Ferriss. Here's my interview with the one and only Tim Ferriss.

5:23You know, all this is your fault, right?

5:29because so so i had this crazy idea samantha and i had this crazy idea to do this bookstore thing and you know when you have you have a crazy idea most people are like oh yeah that sounds great you should blow up your life to become a yoga teacher or whatever you know like it sounds amazing and so i was like i felt like everyone was telling me what i wanted to hear and so i was like you know what i'm gonna call tim tim will tell me if this is a terrible idea or not because you always do. And also I felt like what you really want in those situations, you want disconfirmation, not confirmation. So I was like, Tim will tell me not to do this.

6:05And then I probably won't do it because I felt like you of all people would be like, you know, I take your philosophy to largely, not largely, but a big part of it is like, how do you understand the life you want? How do you avoid unnecessary entanglements, obligations, overhead, you know, the things that sound fun on paper, but actually it turned out you like, you just bought yourself a prison cell, you know? So I was like, I'm going to, I'm going to ask Tim and he's going to tell me probably not to do it. And for a bunch of smart reasons. Anyways, I call you and you're like, I think it sounds like a great idea.

6:37And you're like, but only if you think about it like this. And what you said is don't see yourself as opening a bookstore forever. See yourself as doing a two-year experiment running a bookstore. So decide, obviously that would sort of change how you would do some of the stuff, But your point was, think about it as an experiment. And you said, you'll only know if you want to run a bookstore. You said, how else will you find out if you really want to run a bookstore than by opening a bookstore? And so you gave me permission to do it in a way that I could actually trust and that I didn't feel like you were, you know.

7:19Fluffing your passion. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. That's the name of my new podcast, by the way. And then I think this is the three-year mark. But at the two-year mark, it was like, hey, we actually do really enjoy doing it. We can settle into it a little bit more now. And I think just the idea of seeing doing crazy thing as an experiment or as an iterative process, as opposed to this is permanently my identity. I can never go back. And then being either intimidated by it and not doing it or being locked into it forever if it's not working. Totally. And if I remember correctly, and I could be manufacturing this, but I get a lot of these calls, as you might imagine.

7:57And there are people I call with my own situations where I'm like, am I stupid? Tell me, actually, I'm going to force you. What are the five ways if you had to steal men that this is a terrible decision? Just take that side of the debate table. But I believe that also when we chatted, I said, all right, let's look at the fixed costs. What are the actual investment capital outlays we're talking about? and if it doesn't work, can you hit undo? What's the carrying cost? I'm making this up. These are not real numbers. But if we land at, well, worst case scenario, I think I'll be$50 ,000 to$75 ,000 in the red after all is said and done if I hit undo and have to sell everything after three years.

8:42I'm like, okay, well, would you pay$20 ,000 a year to know once and for all if this is something you enjoy doing? And then you're like, oh, okay, that's actually from a life tuition perspective, something you can wrap your head around. And then you can think about opportunity cost or the cost of taking advantage of an experiment like this. You think that life tuition experiments, that's how you think about it. Because I remember when you decided to be an angel investor, you looked at the cost of going to business school and you said, okay, it's$200 ,000. Why don't I just spend$200 ,000 investing in companies?

9:20and I'll end up at the same place, which is I'll know how to invest in things. And with one, I'll have a degree and a piece of paper. And the other, I might have valuable stakes in a bunch of companies. Or if it fails in both cases, I'll have just$200 ,000 that I lit on fire, but I'll have learned something either way. Yeah, I'll have learned something. I look at it and this is not unique to me. This is something that Mark Andreessen has talked about. This is something, although he, every once in a while, just deletes everything he's ever written. So I'm not sure what the current status of that is.

9:54And Scott Adams has certainly spoken and written about this. He has an entire book, I think, dedicated to effectively, I can't recall the title, but how to win even if you lose. How to fail bigly, perhaps. And the general heuristic is choosing projects based on the skills you will develop and the relationships you will develop, whether those are new or preexisting. such that even if you don't get the outcome, public or private, that would be the objective marker of success. Let's say in the case of investing, making more than you put in. In the case of a bookstore, maybe you could say, all right, if you're trying to compare 100 bookstores, you would look at annual sales and this and that and revenue per employee, blah, blah, blah.

10:40Outside of that, though, what are some of the more abstract or less common line items that you could think about. Those could be skills. Those could be also skills that transfer, relationships that transfer to other areas. So if I look at my collaborations that I've done in various projects, like For Our Chef, which was, from an objective perspective, we look at the bestseller lists, a failure compared to my other books. But it led directly to the podcast. Yeah. And for that reason, it has been my most profitable book by far. If we look at that as an antecedent to the podcast. Right. By far. Yeah.

11:25And you can't, or at least you shouldn't, I shouldn't evaluate the podcast in isolation because the prerequisite was the set of experiences and the launch, which relied heavily on this new thing, relatively speaking, called podcasts. So that's how I think about it. And it takes a lot of also unnecessary stress or pressure out of the situation. Well, it's funny though, because now the advice was very helpful and it feels like it worked out. But for the first year, it seemed like the worst idea in the entire world because we were talking in maybe January of 2020. And so I got serious about it. Like we started the construction the first week of March, 2020.

12:09So for the first year, it wasn't even a bookstore. It was just an enormous albatross around my neck, an empty building filled with books. It was a series of bills that I was paying, but there was nothing coming back the other direction. But I remember I wrote this little note card to myself, speaking of stoicism, I said, this is a test, will make you a better person or a worse person. And so the idea was, yeah, maybe this turns out to be an experiment that goes poorly from a business perspective, but how did I grow as a result of it? What did I learn, right? Did I learn to not do crazy things?

12:49Did I learn actually to do crazy, that I can do crazy things, that I can absorb failures, you know, like - Reframe crazy things by looking at them from a different perspective. Yeah, right. You know, what do you take from it so you can win either way? Right, and the perspective shifting is really important. I'm looking at this bust right behind you. Reframing and thinking about labels very carefully, thinking about expectations very carefully, which tie into language is super important. In the case of angel investing, almost anything you would ever read or hear about angel investing states something that is at face value very obvious, and that is high risk.

13:30Super high risk, even if you're successful, 80 % of the investments will go to zero, yada, yada, yada. But the way that I folded the angel investing into a meta-level plan to develop relationships and learn skills was not risky. Yes. At all. You were going to get that whether the company was hugely successful or hugely unsuccessful. And in fact, you may get those things more on an investment that didn't work than one that did work. Totally. And that certainly ended up being the case. Which is not to say they're called experiments, not guarantees, for a reason. there are plenty that don't turn out the way that I would like them to turn out but as long as I hold it lightly as an experiment and not Tim Ferriss's final exam for his self-worth then you can roll with the punches and it's not always easy well like when a scientist has an hypothesis and then they do an experiment and then the hypothesis turns out to be wrong they're not like angry and they're like you're such an idiot why Why did you think that?

14:31The whole point of the hypothesis was that it might be wrong. And the point of the experiment was to find out if it was right or wrong, not whether you're a genius or an idiot. Yes. And there are human elements in science, of course. And people have confirmation bias. And there's a positive publication bias. And there are all these things. And plenty of politics. You know, Henry Kissinger, RIP, right, said he left academics because he couldn't take the politics. Yeah. At one point. So there was all of that, but the good, really good scientists, including, man, a lot of people have passed in the last year, Roland Griffiths, who I knew really well out of Hopkins, would say that's a hypothesis worth disproving.

15:15I mean, that's the wording that you would sometimes hear. Right, I like that. So looking for disconfirming evidence. Yeah, right. To counterbalance the very human inclination to look for what you want to see. Well, you mentioned Mark Andreessen. And sometimes he tweets like, huge, if true, you know, like he'll take something and be like, that's interesting if it's true. And the idea of like that, so what, that's another way of saying that's a hypothesis worth disproving or proving one way or the other. Yeah, totally. I agree. Yeah, it's your point though about like, okay, so you're going to do this thing.

15:50How do you mitigate or minimize risk or just how do you define what those risks are? To me, that's the essence of socialism. It's also what you've called fear setting because sometimes like you think, okay, I want to do this thing. And then you're like, it could work. It could not work. It's high risk. You know, it's a high risk thing potentially. But actually it might be high risk of success or failure. But what is the actual downside? And sometimes something could be high risk, but the downside could be very low, right? So like oftentimes in our head, we exaggerate the downsides of things, right?

16:26like I remember when I dropped out of college. Obviously, upside's high if it worked out. The downside I thought was I could end up living under a bridge somewhere. But actually the downside was, and I discovered this when I went to fill out the paperwork to drop out. You ended up owning a bookstore. No, the downside was like, she was like, yeah, just come back. Like you're just pausing. So in my head, I was making up that I was making this irrevocable life altering decision. And that's certainly what my parents thought. And that's certainly probably what most people think. But in fact, it was like a piece of administrative paperwork.

17:03And I found it. I found it the other day. It was$60. I have the receipt. It was$60 to effectively pause my enrollment at college, of which I had 10 years to re-enroll. And so what fear setting is, and I think with the stoic, the stoic is called, it's a discipline of perception. It's this practice of going, yeah, I'm intimidated by it. I'm scared of it. I don't want to fail. But if I actually did fail, what's going to happen? And I think you very regularly find not much of anything that's going to happen. It's not as bad as you think it is. And in a lot of cases, it's reversible. In the case of the$60 prepayment for the optionality.

17:44And not to belabor the point, but the language you use matters a lot. So if you think about some of the commonly used language, this is a decision. There's a fork in the road and you have to choose a fork. Implies that going backwards is going to be very difficult. Whereas a lot of these things, at least the way that I try to view them, and I don't do it perfectly, is more like walking into a closet and choosing which sweater you want to put on. You don't like it? Put it back on the rack. Go back to the one you were wearing before. I mean, in a lot of cases, it's a much more appropriate way to view things.

18:26And that is like a pause or it's just really a temporary experiment that you can zig and zag with. Yeah, the language, you're right, is very important and it can cut both directions. So, yeah, we say I'm dropping out of college versus I'm taking a semester off. or yeah, we say I'm quitting my job or one of the phrases you have in the four-hour work week, a mini retirement. Like one feels empowering and the other feels dangerous or irresponsible. And so the language is like, so when I called you and I said, hey, I'm thinking about doing this bookstore and you said, oh, that's a cool experiment.

19:00That was just a totally different phrase for what I was considering doing. All of the language I was using felt so permanent, so life altering, so, you know, enormous. and what you did with your, you shrunk it down to this small decision. Like you're saying, if someone's going to their closet and they're picking out clothes, that's an ordinary metaphor versus, you know, shoot for the moon or something. You know, like are you thinking big or are you thinking small? And sometimes you want to think big, sometimes you want to think small, but just that the way you're looking at it, the words you're using determines like how large it's going to loom over you.

19:40And also I recently reread and it's, it's a little schlocky because it was written a long time ago, but I still find it helpful. There's a book by Dale Carnegie who a lot of people know for, uh, how to win friends and influence people that I believe it was. And he has a lesser known book that has still sold millions of copies called how to stop worrying and start living, which includes a lot of stoic ish tenants. and it's a very fun read because there are many, many different case studies and historical references. A lot of them are out of date. When he talks about neuroscience, don't pay a lot of attention.

20:15However, the general principles and examples are really helpful and he talks a lot about incomplete information and improving your visibility into a given situation by adding more information and that it is somewhat pointless. if you can easily add that information to worry about it beforehand. And the reason I bring that up is that in a case like opening a bookstore, open a bookstore is this big kind of macro abstracted decision. In reality, it's a whole lot of different decisions. Little ones. Little ones. Yes. Such as looking into the actual costs. Yeah. Looking at what's available, looking at the current, let's just call it, borrowing rates, etc.

21:08And so you could say, yes, I'm going to pursue this experiment, but only the next X steps. Like I'm not committing to three years, but I am committing to gathering more information so I can determine if I want to take the 10 steps after those preliminary steps. So I'll do that a lot as well where it's like, okay, do I want to write a next book? Well, how would I decide what types of mini decisions could I make? What types of information could I gather that would help me to have a higher degree of conviction around whether I want to do it or not? Okay, let's take a week and do that first. look at the landscape, talk to agent or agents, talk to authors, look at A, B, C, D, and E.

21:53I mean, of course, look at subject matter and so on. And then you have much better footing for considering if you want to keep pushing forward. But breaking these big, heavy sounding macro decisions into smaller steps also, I think, highlights the fact that you're not firing a gun, right? If you get to C and then you want to stop and not continue to D, you very often have the ability to do that. Yeah. I remember when I was talking to you about starting a podcast, you gave me advice similarly. You were like, don't do a podcast, do six episodes of a podcast, right? And if you think about it, it's like, don't open a restaurant, open a pop-up, right?

22:40So, of course, there's a reason that the economic incentives and life wants you to make big permanent commitments. It's usually cheaper. You know what I mean? They want to lock you in for a long period of time. They want you to be more invested. And you have to understand that what you're purchasing is a certain amount of optionality by not fully committing. And so going, hey, I'm going to do six episodes, that can feel harder in some ways, but it's easier in that it allows you to just do the thing, not overthink it, get started on it. And then hopefully the feedback either gives you momentum in one direction or the other about what you should or shouldn't do.

23:20What it also does is it gives you a graceful exit. So when people ask me about podcasts, this is true for a lot of things. I'm like limited time only. That is the key phrasing or at least concept that you put forth so that you don't succumb to the very kind of chimpanzee politics inclinations that we all have. I'm going to be embarrassed. It's going to look like a failure. I can't stop because of the following types of perceptions. But if you just say up front, I'm doing a single season of a podcast, six episodes, 10 episodes. if it goes well and you extend it everybody's happy versus saying i'm going to have a podcast implying indefinite and then stopping after six or ten episodes psychologically it's much more difficult for the person in the driver's seat in this case you or me to make that exit and so to preserve the flexibility i do that all the time and the optionality is important now infinite net optionality as a problem.

24:20And then you have decision fatigue and so on. But I was given a book at one point. I can't even remember the title. I can't remember anything about the book other than it was related to financial management. And the line I remembered from it, because there was a section that talked about how people who have some degree of financial success spend like 10 to 20 years accumulating. And then they realize, fuck, this is a mess. I have so much clutter, so many obligations, so many ongoing, uh, headaches that now I'm going to divest myself. And then they spend the next like 10 to 20 years trying to divest themselves of these things.

24:58And in that context, which applies in a lot of circumstances, even if you're not wealthy per se by top 1 % kind of standards, rich enough to rent. Yeah. And I was like, huh? It was like rich enough to rent. and that means try it before you buy it before you buy it and which means you might try it indefinitely yeah try it without buying it in the sense that i love mountains and rivers i spent a lot of time in the mountains all over the place and the the advice that i received from a lot of friends who know me super well was oh you should buy a place yeah and the fact of the matter was the handful of places I looked at, I felt very confident we're going to do well in the real estate market.

25:46I could be wrong. I could be right. So far I've been right. And I don't actually don't think the logic is that hard to follow. But when I looked at the costs, I'm like, okay, where have I underestimated costs? Energetic as well. Energetic time costs, not just financial costs in the past, because I do own some real estate. It's like, all right, well, you think about the closing cost and the monthly cost, it's very, this sounds stupid, but it's, it's sometimes easy to forget like, Oh, wait a second. HOA dues. Oh, wait a second. Property taxes. Oh, wait a second. The sink broke and the downstairs flooded and now you have to replace it.

26:19Yeah. Right. It goes on and on. And if you have an exterior, it just gets, I mean, look, I'm talking to the guy with Nigerian dwarf coats and a lot of property. So you get it. And when I looked at these locations, I very quickly realized I could rent the most absurd opulent place for a few months a year well beyond anything I would ever buy. I could do that probably for a decade and I would not approach my first and second year costs of buying something. Now the sort of homeowner equity argument has some rationale to it but there are trade-offs. It's not all upside. And so for me to reduce psychic drag, I'm like, okay, first of all, you don't need to be an investor in all categories, a good financial investor.

27:10And in fact, you can make money doing other things. You don't have to make money in everything you do. I would take it a step further, which is sometimes it makes sense to quote unquote, lose money in a very consciously aware way in certain categories so that it frees up your mental and psychic bandwidth to make money in a category that's more aligned with your zone of genius. Like real estate is not my zone of genius. You know, you're talking to the guy whose first house, he bought adjustable rate mortgage in 2007. Oops. Got my face ripped off. Yeah. Immediately. And I have made a lot of mistakes in say like public markets.

27:46Yeah. Once you get fancy, fancy gets broken. Like as soon as you try to get clever, at least in my case, I get swiftly kicked in the balls by the universe. This has happened over and over again. So I've realized not only do I not need to make money in certain categories, but I can make nominal sacrifices financially in some areas that free up a bunch of energy and resources that I can allocate somewhere where it matters a lot more.

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31:14So you said something to me one time in regards to that. You said something like, what do you do with your money, right? And I was like, what do you mean? You're like, do you like buy speed boats or like, you know, what are you, you're like, what are your like expensive hobbies, right? And I was like, I don't really have any. And then you're like, okay, so make your career and business decisions accordingly. That might have been related to the bookstore. No, no, this is well before. I remember I was walking around in New York City. I just started, I think, my first company. Your point was, if you don't need lots of money, don't optimize your life around earning lots of money, right?

31:52I guess what you're saying is like, if you don't need it, why are you trading? This is a very stoic idea. Why are you trading your most precious resources, which is your life, or in my case, my creative energy? Why are you trading that to get a thing that you don't necessarily need? Right? You weren't saying like money is not important. You were just saying, if money is not your number one priority, make sure that you're not doing things for which the statement is money is my most important priority. Yeah, right. Look at your calendar, right? Yeah. Don't tell me what's important. Like, signal your calendar.

32:25I'll tell you what's important to you. Well, I think what I like about this is, okay, so oftentimes when people think about Stoicism, they think about it as a philosophy that is resilient. It's about dealing with adversity. It's about dealing with difficulty. And it's true. I mean, Epictetus is a slave, right? Marx Aurelius lives in a plague. The Stoics lived hard lives. But it's also a philosophy for success. I don't mean it's a philosophy that will make you successful. The idea is the Stoics are saying that everything is an opportunity to practice the Stoic virtues. And by that, they meant you get your arm cut off, you know, a pandemic happens, you get thrown in prison on unjust charges.

33:04These are opportunities to practice stoicism. But it's also a chance to practice stoicism when you find yourself the emperor. It's a chance to practice stoicism if the company that you invested in becomes worth billions of dollars, right? Or if you become successful as an author or whatever you do. Like, I think less explored because it's slightly less relatable. Most people are dealing with hard things. Stoicism is also a philosophy designed to help you with abundance or success in life. Would you agree? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. How has stoicism helped you? I mean, you've done very well. You've done lots of interesting things.

33:42You've been at the top of the author game, the podcast game. You've been a great investor. How do you think of stoicism in that sense as something that helps you deal with what we would call champagne problems or too much of a good thing. You know, like stoicism is also there. You can see the YouTube thumbnail now. Tim Ferriss on champagne problems. There are a few things that immediately come to mind. So the first is I do a lot of things that I know are perceived by many people to be high risk that I don't consider high risk at all because I've run through exercises and journaling and so on that lean very heavily on stoic practices and have come to the definitive conclusion that this is not holistically high risk in the long game.

34:29Yeah. Like the real world MBA where I traded Stanford Business School for the... Crucible of angel investing. That's right. The in theory Tim Ferriss fund of angel investing that I deployed over two years. And yes, there was a risk. Even the expectation, it wasn't even just a risk. I expected that like tuition, that money would vanish. And I was like, okay, let's assume the money vanishes. How can I approach the angel investing in such a way that my skills and relationships developed over that period of time far exceed what I am expecting to lose? And so I pulled the trigger. Now, the timing was also incredibly lucky in retrospect.

35:16At the time it wasn't obvious, but in retrospect, it was very lucky. but there was also some deliberation around it in the sense that, and I think this is compatible with, it might not be verbatim reflective of Stoic writings, but thinking about competition very carefully. In other words, this is very, Seneca's not the only who has written about this, but in terms of competing with your peers and wanting to want to, keeping up with the joneses oh you want to wear a purple tunic do you hmm let's talk about that you think you're a success that person has more than you yeah right right you feel like you need to go to the banquets and you need to do this and you need to do that when i find an area that is crowded or competitive i look at that as an opportunity to find something that is very uncrowded oh sure so that has also helped me for instance i'm coming up on the 10th year of the podcast and podcasting has become incredibly competitive.

36:21Yeah. And there was a long time when I felt like I was category of one. And if I'm being honest with myself, that's no longer the case. There's some very, very good interviewers out there, yourself among them. And the production quality has gone parabolic. It is, it is going to be harder to build a business and to fight for successfully fight for attention in this particular format. And I love doing my podcast. I'm going to continue doing it. However, because I would pay to have these conversations anyway, by and large. I'm taking a moment, Sarah, wait a second. When I did angel investing from say 2008 to 2015, it got crowded.

37:13I felt like it went from single deck blackjack where you can kind of count the cards to like, you know, five deck. And then the, the, the table stakes got a lot higher because the terms got weird. There's a lot of money coming in from places like China and sovereign wealth funds. And I was like, Oh man, this is going to get very, now the risk is real for me financially. Sure. So I stopped for a while. And I've done that over and over again. I stopped the books for a while. And in this particular case, I'm like, all right, I may not find an answer, but it would be a mistake not to look for an answer.

37:49Like, what's neglected? And that's not necessarily something new. For instance, I think text is neglected. I think writing is neglected. Yes. And text isn't dead. It's just not surfaced by the algorithms. It's just not favored at the moment. It's the most perennial of the mediums. It's the most perennial and it's the hardest. So if I'm looking at differentiation and competitive advantage, you have this too, right? You can write. Writing's hard. Writing is very, very hard, at least for me. And for that reason, I'm like, all right, well, maybe it's just the return to basics in that sense. Maybe it's fitting something old into a new vehicle etc etc let's come up with a lot of bad ideas to see if there's maybe one or two good ideas we can test and so to come back to your question though i i think that that is a way of avoiding comparison with others that can lead directly to outperformance if we're talking about success in financial terms but it's It's also very compatible with success on your own terms.

39:02I think Kevin Kelly is a great example of this. He has really forged his own life. There are other people for sure, but he's very good at questioning basic assumptions that are common. They're so common that it's taken to be fact, but in most instances you can kind of negotiate reality around a lot of these assumptions. I was thinking of other sort of success problems that socialism helps with, like haters is probably one or people who don't like you or negative attention on top of. Yeah. I mean, the more, especially if you're, if your version of success or what you're pursuing is going to make you more public, you are going to have to deal with all sorts of things that at least at current, you have not faced this magnitude of negative attention.

39:56and I've seen people buckle under that if they don't have the toolkit. And the toolkit doesn't have to be sophisticated, by the way. Like rule number one, don't go looking for it. It's kind of like, all right, if you're going to do shuffle sprints on top of broken floorboards, you're going to stub your toe all the time. And then, I mean, I'll admire you if you have the best stubbed toe fix, but maybe you just shouldn't run across the floorboards barefoot, which is what a lot of folks do when they're kind of hunting for comments. but being human, ending up fixating on the one or two people who are awful.

40:30I remember one time you said something like, okay, so let's say how many people know who you are, right? Like the first part of your career as a creative person, really even anything that relies on the public, is you want lots of people to find out who you are. Your first problem is a lack of awareness. And then you get the awareness. Now, a certain percentage of those people are not going to like you, or they're going to have had a bad experience, or you're going to trick or something. Or they're going to be nuts. Yeah, right. Right. So, so like, you know, Daily Stoic has, let's say, 3 million Instagram followers.

40:58So let's say 10 % of those people are just not fans. That's hundreds of thousands of people who just plain don't, who know who you are, but don't like you. Whereas in normal life, you know, if 10 % of the people you meet don't like you, those people could fit in a small SUV. You know what I mean? Like, it's not, it's not that many people. And also like 20 years ago, they're not enabled with the ability to publicly They can't reach all the other people. Yeah, right. And so I think that's a very key story. Mark Sturulus has to come to terms with the fact that he's the emperor of Rome. Some people don't even like that there's an emperor.

41:32Some people don't like him for good reasons. Some people don't like him for bad reasons. But the point is you're not going to please everyone. And in fact, part of the job is just putting up with the fact that a bunch of people hate you. And having to come to terms with the fact that, one, it's outside your control. You can't make everyone like you. And two, if you try to make those people who don't like you, like you, or you spend your time obsessing about them, what you're doing is making yourself miserable and not servicing or serving the people and things that do like you, that you are good at.

42:05Yeah, totally. I was wondering, I don't know if you know this, this is a pretty sort of arcane fact to ask for, but do you have any idea what the greater, not the Roman empire, but the greater Rome area, let's just call it, just like you would have the greater Austin area. or Rome Central. Do you have any idea what the population was around Marcus Aurelius' day? So the empire I know, because I looked it up for something, is like 50 million people. So let's say Rome is 10 % of that, right? There's still millions of people, right? Where I was going with that is more people may dislike you and me individually than hated Marcus Aurelius at his peak as the last of the great emperors of Rome.

42:50Yeah, yeah, totally. Which is kind of hilarious to think about. Or to think there's probably more Stoics now than have ever existed before in history, right? There may be more people who know about Stoicism but don't like me specifically than have ever been interested in Stoicism ever, right? Like, you know, the numbers get really big really fast because that's what technology allows for when you live in a world of 8 billion people. Technology allows you to reach lots and lots of people. And it's not healthy or realistic for humans to be subjected to that. But we are subjected to it, right? Like, so you think success is going to be amazing.

43:28And it is in a lot of ways. But it's subjecting you to a fundamentally unnatural, really difficult thing, which is like, you have to wake up and deal with the weight of the fact that like lots of people like hate you. Like they hate you. and if you don't have the sort of fortitude and the confidence to just sit with that and to not let it eat at you or make you swerve off what you think you're supposed to be doing, like you're gonna get eaten alive. Yeah, you'll get eaten alive. You'll eat yourself alive. You'll eat yourself alive. And I think stoicism and reflecting on applications of stoic-like thinking, right?

44:12Because I'm not a stoic fundamentalist. I'm not like, this is the scripture. This is the end all be all. Well, let's extend that. Right, exactly. So let's extend, let's expand. All right. What other ways could this type of thinking apply? And I think that extends to 80-20 principle, Richard Koch type stuff. I think it extends to, it's really about the number of people who get it, not the number of people who don't get it. It's Kevin Kelly, 1 ,000 true fans type of thinking. Blue ocean versus red ocean, blue ocean strategy kind of stuff. These are all highly, highly compatible. And I would go further to say there are a lot of people who, at this point, they've probably heard the word stoic.

44:56Yeah. At least in the modern sense. Yeah, lowercase. But they're not familiar with the canon of stoicism. yet if you look at anyone who has thrived in what most people consider high-stress environments, they're going to walk the walk. I think that there's such a selection bias. There's a survival bias towards anyone who indirectly or directly has put into practice these principles on a regular basis that if you look at, and this is just the other hypotheticals, I haven't asked these people, but anyone from a Bob Iger to a hedge fund manager to an exceptionally good athlete who has had longevity, if you were to sit them down and walk them through Marcus Aurelius and so on for the first time, they'd be like, oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

45:49No, that's how I live my life. Yes. Yeah, you have to, because look, the chief task in life, the Stokes would say, is finding what's in your control and what's not in your control. Now, this is going to shift depending on who you are and where you are in the world, right? Like Epictetus' understanding of what was in his control and what's not in control, it's going to be fundamentally different than Marcus Rius. They're living a generation apart. One's a slave. One's the most powerful man in the world. One has slightly more things that are in his control than the other. But still fundamentally, they're limited by gravity, right?

46:23They're limited by the weather. They're limited by mortality. You know, they're limited by the fact that most people don't care what they have to say or think, you know, like the unpredictable nature of human beings. Like, so yeah, it changes a little bit, but more things remain outside your control than in your control. And that fundamentally dealing with stress, high performance, success, whatever you're dealing with is coming down to this really basic, almost so basic, it doesn't feel like it could be ancient philosophy. but is, is like, hey, what part of this can I influence? And what part of this do I have to accept and just deal with and find a way to adapt and get comfortable with?

47:08And I think stoicism, as I think about it, you're much more familiar, of course. You are very much familiar with the canon and the figures and thinking and the latest sort of modern examples. but from my perspective stoicism is good for survival and self-preservation for the same reason it's good for success yeah however you might define that but let's just say being an outlier in some type of performance it is because stoicism stoicism helps you to conserve and best deploy your limited resources. So for instance, if you are, and humans are humans, right? So you're going to slip, you're going to make mistakes.

47:59At least certainly I do. So a lot of this is work in progress. But if you are easily offended, you're a poor resource allocator. And if you look at the most successful CEOs of all time in a book, interestingly enough called The Outliers is one example. One of the key characteristics is they're very good. Capital allocators, but what that comes down to is limited resource allocators. So time, energy, attention, capital in this case. I think that the tenets of stoicism help you to be a better resource allocator coming back to what you said by pausing a lot to say or think about what is in your control and what is out of your control.

48:44If it's out of your control, trying to allocate as few calories, as few minutes, as few dollars to that as humanly possible. And sometimes it's tricky. Sometimes it's hard. Sometimes there are gray areas. And so you have to make your best fast decision with the information that you have. But I think that the tools are the same. The tools are the same. And there are plenty of things I've folded into my own life that are, I think, highly compatible with stoicism that you might not find in the pages of some of the classics. But it's a mistake to think about stoicism as a joyless toolkit for preventing pain and ensuring survival.

49:29There's a lot more to it. Of course. It's a more flexible toolkit. Yeah. My wife's been saying that the key skill in life, because we're thinking about this with young kids, she says the key skill in life is the ability to deal with frustration. Yeah. Or that basically at the end of the day, it comes down to, can you regulate your emotions? And so whether you're dealing with a catastrophe or what Tennessee Williams calls the catastrophe of success, which is its own catastrophe, it basically comes down to emotional regulation. Can you regulate extreme elation? Can you regulate extreme despair? And can you figure out how not to be overwhelmed by the situation you're in, but figure out, okay, what am I going to do about it?

50:08What, what am I being asked to do here? What's the best thing to do here? What's going to get me in more trouble? What's going to give you a lot? You know, you're, you're trying to figure out how do you, how do you integrate, address, respond, not be corrupted by, you know, whatever the moment that you're in. And that's the same at an either end of the extremes. And you can, you can really extend the scope of regulation. at least I do to think about a lot of different factors and also a compatible and I think complementary word which is repair. So I have a very hypervigilant system. We don't have to spend time on it but I had some awful things happen to me as a kid and my sympathetic nervous system goes into overdrive very easily.

51:02And I have tried a million and one tools for preventing this from happening. But the reality is that there are many instances in any given week. This week is actually a very good example. Actually texted a friend. Can I curse on this podcast? Where I was like, because he knows what's going on. And I was like, so I put in quotation marks. I was like, surprise, bitch. It's time for your surprise semester exam from the universe. And I was like, okay. Sure. You're doing all this meditation, reading all this stoicism. Yeah. Let's see what you got. Yeah. And this week was one of those weeks. And there have been times when I'm like, my God, like my resting heart rate is at like 120.

51:42Yeah. And then it's about repair. And the tools are the same. The tools are very similar, right? Thinking about like sitting down, doing a little serenity prayer.

51:53and also thinking about the worst case scenario, testing assumptions, and the repair is incredibly important and also thinking about not just what thoughts are you going to have, what questions are you going to ask, what exercises are you going to do in your head that will help in these moments, whether it's preventative or repair, but also thinking about the conditions that lend themselves to dysregulation. too much caffeine, too little sleep, alcohol before bed.

52:26And a lot of the times, like you don't need to sit down, you're having a really rough day and you're like, wow, I need to figure out my life. Fuck, what am I going to do when I grow up? I'm lost. And it's like, no, you have low blood sugar and you didn't sleep. Like you need some macadamia nuts and a cold shower and a nap.

52:45You probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits. This is having a profound impact on the world's poorest people and the world's poorest communities. But, you know, just hearing about that, that's not what stoicism is about. Stoicism is, to me, what you're going to do about it. And that's where GiveWell comes in. GiveWell is trusted by tens of thousands of donors each year because they provide free and independent research that helps you understand how to have a big impact. GiveWell has spent the last 18 years research in global health and poverty alleviation, and they direct funding to the highest impact opportunities.

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53:59To claim your match, go to GiveWell.org and pick Daily Stoic from the drop-down menu under podcast. That's how they know that you heard about GiveWell from The Daily Stoic, and you'll get your donation matched. That's GiveWell.org, code The Daily stoic to donate or find out more. Well, it's almost here. Christmas is just a couple of days away and maybe you're scrambling. You're like, what should I get my dad? What should I get my mom? I got to get something to my sister. People love showing off pictures of their kids and that's where today's sponsor comes in. I've gotten one as a gift. I've given it as a gift.

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55:36And don't you think repair, one, taking care of yourself, so self-care, working through it, but this is something I definitely think the Stoics didn't talk about enough. And so I don't think the Stoics are flawless or perfect in any way, but it's also repair to the person you yelled at because you got upset or the person you were frustrated with because you were anxious or, you know, any, or the person you neglected because you were consumed by this thing, right? Right? Like stoicism isn't never freaking out, never going into a downward spiral, never being overwhelmed by your emotions. It's hopefully catching yourself before you've done something terrible as a result of those things.

56:17And hopefully as you get better, ratcheting sooner and sooner how fast you can do it. But it's what you do after you've done it. Right? After you have the awareness to go, okay, I didn't live up to my standards here. I did something I shouldn't have done. I understand and empathize with the consequences that had on you. And I'm sorry, right? Like that, that, that, that stoicism isn't just being this invulnerable, disconnected, you know, yeah. Autonomous being, but you exist in society and you exist in relationships and, and that the repair isn't just to yourself, but to those people too. other other practices that uh i mean i i do sometimes i'll be honest skip some of the very esoteric uh cosmological like teleological not so much generally so i skip a lot of that but there are a few things that i feel like i've indirectly taken from that that are very much along the lines of some of the chapters in 4 ,000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman, which I think is a great book.

57:29I really enjoyed this book. And there is a chapter, I think it's called Cosmic Insignificance Therapy, but really zooming out and looking at your goals, problems, hangups, neuroses in a broader and broader context of the world and history and the universe. And this sounds very hand-wavy, but it ends up being very, very therapeutic. And I've had a number of people who I have interviewed who have arrived on their own to some type of similar exercise. People who have supervised thousands of deaths in hospice care, memory champions, military leaders. Astronauts. Astronauts, who all do have done some version of this.

58:20and the reason i bring that up is that it's another way to take the magnifying glass off of some of your issues yeah right like reflect on the problems like this week five years ago what were you worried about can't remember yeah exactly right right right well i was just thinking about this because so two different times in meditations talks about taking the view from above he calls it plato's view and so i was thinking about that I was like, well, how tall could you get in Rome? So Marcus Aurelius has this column. They erect this column as a monument to his victories. And it's like a hundred something meters tall.

58:57So like if Marcus could get to the top of this column, which we don't know if he did or not, that's like 300 feet. And I think the tallest mountain in Rome at that, not at that time, of all time, it's like 15 ,000 feet or something like that. And he never climbed that. But the point is in Marcus's time, that's as high as you could physically get, right? and now you can get that on a southwest flight for$99 double that right you can get it 30 ,000 feet and look down at you see enormous you know plots of land states you know you all of a sudden you see it and and you see how small it is and astronauts call this the overview effect like you think about humans did not see the earth a human being did not see the earth from not on earth until like 1972, like the blue marble photo and how what a paradigm perspective shifting piece of information that was, right?

59:50Like America is the most powerful country on earth at that time. We have nuclear weapons, all this stuff. And then you see us as just one of the green continents on a little marble that's mostly ocean. And all of a sudden it shrinks way down. And you think about all the people who had all these problems in each individual pixel on that photo. And it shrunk down to that exact cosmic significance. And the astronauts that have been there, they're like, you feel two things. You feel total insignificance and you also feel complete and total interconnectedness because all the borders and boundaries and distinctions that separate us as human beings go away when you get that big also.

1:00:36I really recommend people at least read this chapter. You should read the whole book, 4 ,000 Weeks. It's a great book. The Cosmic Insignificance Therapy. If you search that in my name, I liked that chapter so much that I reached out to Oliver and got an excerpt. So that chapter is available on my blog and people can read it. So I really do suggest that. Another thing that came to mind, you can tell me if this is somewhere in the Stoic writings. And this has come up a lot for me. over the years and has come up very recently also, which is the belief that, and I'm borrowing here, this is definitely attributed to somebody else, but never let a good crisis go to waste.

1:01:17Yes. And really deeply believing, and this could be self-deception, but it's enabling self-deception. It's very beneficial self-deception in a sense that if you're really experiencing a seismic shift of a problem or something that is a very non-trial problem, to look at that problem and to really sit down and ideally write out how the problem is based on your assumptions that you have about how things should work or how you should do things. and I think it's Dan Sullivan who I've never had any direct interactions with but he runs something called I think it's the strategic coach and he talks about how the problem isn't the problem it's how you view the problem that is the problem it's not things that upset us it's our opinion about things exactly and to figure out why is this a problem is it because your five friends handle this problem in this way and they have established this as a priority because it is a problem for them?

1:02:31Is it something you should be doing in the first place? Is there a way to remove this entire category of problem by stopping something, by hiring someone, by firing someone, et cetera? And I'm doing a lot of that right now. It's a good time for us to have this conversation because it's a good reminder for me on a lot of levels and I'm having to pull out all the tools in the toolkit. I gave a talk to Live Nation last week. And so I was like trying to think like, what's like a music story I could tell? And so I told the story of Taylor Swift. So like in 2019, Taylor Swift's masters are sold from her first five albums.

1:03:07They're actually bought by Scooter Braun. She's very upset by this. Scooter Braun reads the Daily Stoic. So I make no judgment. He's cool with me. But her masters are sold, right? And she decides that this is a problem. She's very upset by it, right? and can't argue with the fact that she doesn't like it, right? Like you can say this is just a part of how the music business works and that he didn't do anything wrong, but she didn't like it, right? To her, it represented this kind of betrayal. And she was really pissed off that now somebody else controls the masters to her music. So funny enough, she sees this tweet, Kelly Clarkson tweets about it, like two musicians helping each other, I guess.

1:03:46And she goes, why don't you just rerecord all your masters and put out new art, right? Which seems like a crazy idea. like why would anyone do that but that's what she did she spent the whole pandemic re-recording every song plus a bunch of bonus songs and shooting new art for her first five albums right so when people think like taylor swift is now unequivocally the biggest artist in the world maybe the biggest also raises so many questions for me about the how you can even legally do that also well i know copyright is the expression yes but there's a two tier there's two kinds of intellectual property in music, which is interesting, which I don't fully understand either.

1:04:21But the point is when, when people see like the Ares tour, like, which is not just the most successful concert tour in history, it's earned more than the first, the second and third two tours have combined. Like even the, the movie about the tour has made over a hundred million dollars, right? So it's the biggest thing in the history of music, probably the history of the entertainment business, of a singular artist doing a singular thing. It's actually a result. You want to talk about the obstacles away. It's a result of this seemingly terrible thing happening to her, right? So the thing happens to her, her masters are sold, but how she responds to it, her decision not to waste it and to use it to channel that energy into some productive end is what creates what's possible now, right?

1:05:07Because it seems like she's always been this big And she has always been big. But the process of re-releasing five consecutive albums plus two or three that she recorded just of all new music during the pandemic makes her like this powerhouse in music because it's like every day there's a new song. Every month there's something new from her. So she's just been the recipient of just endless amounts of media attention. She's been rediscovered by a whole generation of people, right? And then it sets up going on this tour where she says, I'm going to play music from every era of my life. Right. And so I was just, I think it's such an interesting example.

1:05:50Like when we say never let a crisis go to waste. Crisis isn't, you know, your whole family is murdered in front of you. Right. Crisis is also just like something that you didn't want to happen happens to you. And then you are defined by what you do in response to that. And it can be a springboard for things that not only you didn't think were possible, but like nobody thought were possible. Artists typically rerecord their music and it's just this like kind of technical legal thing that manifests itself in the fan experience in basically no noticeable way. But the way she did it and the way she set it up, set about this transformational, transcendent series of events that have made her what she is.

1:06:34And that all comes from this thing that if you had asked her in that moment, do you want this to happen to you? She would have said, not on my fucking life. I would rather die than that happen. And that's what we have the ability to do. And so I think when we think of stoicism as this philosophy of resilience and creativity, and it's, she's a very privileged person when this happens to her. She's already extremely successful. It's not just for you at your lowest moment, but you can transform things that happen to you into that if you want. Yeah, I mean, on a much smaller scale. Yeah. I mean, what?

1:07:12Everything is on a smaller scale. What wouldn't be on a smaller scale? For Hour Chef, right? That was a book that completely burned me out. I mean, I burned myself out. Sure. It was probably a three-year, very complex book, very, very detailed, very involved. My first four-color book, I decided it would be a great idea if I did like 40 % of the photography myself, even though I'm not a photographer. Great idea. Also, just you wanted to learn a thing you didn't know how to do. Right. That was like, also just the content of the book itself, like the ideas was not easy. Yeah. This was an incredibly difficult book.

1:07:46I'm very proud of how it was executed, but crammed something. I think it should have been three or four years into a year, year and a half and just flamed out. Yeah. And at the time, again, I would have said, I absolutely would never have wanted this outcome. Yeah. But when you have an experience like that, or when Taylor has an experience like that, I can't speak for her, but I imagine. Yeah. What an experience like that does is it allows you, it gives you permission to take time to step back. Yeah. and to pause and to look at things with fresh eyes in a way that you often disallow yourself from doing.

1:08:27If you are chugging along, keeping the trains running on time, following your daily, weekly routine, whatever that might be. And it doesn't always work out, but in my case, without that window, also without that extreme fatigue, I would not have, I do not think I would have possibly experimented with the podcast. I was just writing about this kind of pine tree and I'm forgetting what it's called exactly, but I have one of the pine cones in my office as a reminder. But basically, so it's like any other pine tree, drops a pine cone, pine cone has the seeds in it, right? That's how the new trees come.

1:09:05But these pine cones, like, you know, if you ever see a pine cone that hasn't like done that yet, it's still like the green. it only unlocks when it is subjected to temperatures that weather alone cannot reach so it's only forest fires that allow it to do what it does so the thing that is the worst thing in the world for the tree which is a fire which burns down the forest is also what allows a new stand of trees to come in its place right and so like it's funny i was i was looking at the tree I was like, this doesn't look burned. Like, how did it, how did she get it to open? I bought it on Etsy.

1:09:41Well, she puts them in a tray and then she puts it in the oven. Like she gets them, she puts it in the oven. But the point is it only does what it does when subjected to extreme, you might even say unnatural amounts of stress or adversity. And there is something, to me, that's the essence of what stoic philosophy is. Like Marcus Aurelius is a student of philosophy and he becomes emperor. and then basically everything that can go wrong goes wrong for the next 20 consecutive years, right? There's the Antonine Plague, there's floods, there's a coup attempt, there's war, right? He buries multiple children, right?

1:10:19Like it's like everything that can go wrong goes wrong. But that's when he becomes Marcus Aurelius. Like he would have been his predecessor, Antoninus, his model in all things. Basically nobody knows his name. And nobody thinks about him at all because he got 20 years of peace and prosperity. Like everything that could go right goes right for him and he's basically forgettable. Everything goes wrong for Marcus and he becomes the person that you read about in the pages of meditations, right? And so it's this idea, I think, that you want things to go the way you think you want them to go. And then it's only when they don't go that way that you figure out what you're really capable of and you do the things that really you're only capable of in those moments.

1:11:04It makes me think, I haven't thought about this in a long time, but it was either Ann Murico, who was a very well-known investor, tech investor, or Mike Maples also. They worked together, investor. I think it was one of the two, but apologies if I'm misattributing, guys. Which is something along the lines of sometimes you need life to save you from what you think you want. Yeah.

1:11:26and that has been i think a real key for me are those mints or nicotine you want a caffeine mint oh caffeine mint no i'm good

1:11:43yeah you you think you want it to go a certain way and of course it doesn't i i i was just reading this story about hemingway so hemingway is this aspiring novelist he's uh living with his wife in France. He's in Switzerland and he's meeting with this famous journalist and his wife, he like telegrams her to come meet him. He wants to introduce her to her, but she basically, she takes, she's like, oh, he wants me to bring all his work to show off to this guy. So she gets everything he's ever written in his life. She gathers it all up, puts it in a briefcase, gets on a train, heads towards Switzerland.

1:12:18She's in a train station in like Lyons or something. and she gets off to get like a coffee. She comes back to the train car. The briefcase is gone. Oh God. Was it stolen? Did she lose it? Did she set it? We don't know, but it's gone. Everything he has ever written disappears. And Hemingway was of course devastated and it feels like his whole life is ruined. I don't know how a marriage would possibly recover from this. It does not, right? But he writes this letter a few weeks later to Ezra Pound and he goes, I know what you're going to tell me. he's like you're gonna tell me good start over but he's like i'm not there yet you know and i love that too because it's easy to be flipping about this like taylor swift did not the next day after her master cell go i'm gonna re-record all my albums and it's gonna transform me into the stratosphere right like it's okay to feel sorry for yourself for a while it's okay to fucking be pissed too and i don't think there's i don't you look you think about all the things mark Stereos goes through.

1:13:20There's got to be days he does not get out of bed, right? He must have been devastated and pissed off. But it's after you accept it and then you get to work on it that you can turn it into that thing. And what happens is basically, like a forest fire, all the underbrush for Hemingway is cleared out and he has to start over. And he invents his new sort of writing style as a result of basically in his mid-20s losing everything, right? So in retrospect, we know this is what happens. We look at any phase in your life where the worst thing that could happen to you happened to you. Now you have integrated it in and you see how it helped you get where you're going.

1:14:00Yeah, by the way, with the podcast, it wasn't obvious on day one. It wasn't even obvious on the anniversary of year one, probably not even year two. Yeah. It was not clear. And I also want to state for the record that not all crises turn into these Willy Wonka golden tickets. A lot of them are just things that you need to weather. But I've tried to cultivate the habit of at least looking for the possibility that there is an angle from which I can see something that I would miss if I were just singing the Woe is Me song. Well, it's like sometimes the disaster or the crisis presents an opportunity to advance professionally or, you know, from a profit perspective.

1:14:48Like sometimes, hey, this thing closes this door and it opens this crazy window that you never would have gone through. And that turns out to be the best thing that happens to you. I think it's important when we say the obstacles away. Obviously, I wrote a book on this. But like I'm not saying that everything is that, right? Because how does a cancer diagnosis become that? Or like the death of your father become that? or a pandemic where millions of people die. Like shit happens that's just fucking terrible, right? That's life. And it's important that we're not dismissive of the profound pain and anguish that's a result of that.

1:15:20The Stoics would still say the opportunity, and I don't think they would use the word opportunity because it feels, again, insensitive, but they would say that still demands of you certain character traits. It's still an opportunity for what they would call erite or excellence. Like you still have to be a person inside that and you have to weather it, endure it, be of service to your fellow human beings. You know what I mean? So it's not always like a chance to just like make more money or, you know, build your brand. Like it's not always great for your career, but it can always be. That's why I wrote during the pandemic, I wrote that note.

1:15:58I didn't say like, this is the chance for you to like make a killing in real estate or like, this is a chance for you to really take a lock on the independent bookstore market. Like I was looking out over this bookstore that was looking like it was going to be the biggest failure of my life and go, it can make me a better person or a worse one, right? Like it can also cost me my marriage. It could also cost me my creative energy. I could make it worse if I wanted to. I could also be improved by it, right? I could become more aware of my capacities. I could learn from the mistakes. My relationship could get better.

1:16:37My connection to human beings could get better. I could realize, hey, in the big scheme of things, none of this shit matters. You know, there's so many things you could take from it to emerge as a better person, almost all of which are not related to money or success in really any way.

1:16:59Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode.

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