Until You Get There, Try This | Ask DS

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2:26welcome 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 we're trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening. And we hope this is of use to you.

3:09Until you get there, try this. Maybe towards the end, it's possible to get to that level. Maybe after a lifetime of study and practice, the stoic can come not just to understand, but to live up to the insight that Marcus Aurelius writes about in meditations, that things aren't asking to be judged by us, that we always have the power to have no opinion. Maybe Marksurelis even got there himself. If so, good for him. But most likely he didn't. And most likely you're nowhere close either. In the meantime, why don't you at least try to voice fewer of these opinions? If we can't stop ourselves from judging things that aren't asking to be judged by us, if we can't stop ourselves from having thoughts about things that have little to do with us, we can at least try to keep those thoughts and judgments to ourselves.

3:57We can just keep our mouth shut. We don't have to verbalize our yuck for someone else's yum. We don't have to voice our disagreement. We don't have to comment. We don't have to get offended. We can just keep quiet, focus on what we control, and not cause unnecessary trouble for anyone. Most of all, ourselves.

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6:03You talk about and you go into detail in your book, which after this, we do have Ryan's latest book, Courage is Calling, that I just listened to. and it's phenomenal and very thought-provoking. But in your book, you go into depth and you went a little bit into it, say, around preparation. And you talked a little bit about it, eating the frog and how you do that. And you alluded to your morning, you don't actually eat the frog, but maybe some days. You go on your walk. Can you maybe share with this group, because, well, and with me, When I think about soldiers, when I think about athletes, it's easy for me to think about preparation, right?

6:51Lifting weights, doing drills, scrimmaging, you know, battlefield techniques, right? But in the business world or in maybe even your personal life with parenting or finances or death of family, it's hard to, in my mind, it's hard to physically think about that. Yeah, how do you practice? So do you, you know, maybe how you do it or how maybe you've seen other people and like, dang, that guy does it or girl does it really well. Can you maybe share a little bit about that? And then and then we'll open it up for Q &A. Yeah, that's the tricky thing. I think a lot of, you know, games, whether it's chess or sports or music or whatever, it's a constrained set of rules or a system so you can practice.

7:31Right. I heard a great question. They're like, do musicians get better by practicing their scales? What are the scales of what you do? That's sort of the million-dollar question. And the people that can figure that out have the ability to practice, and the people that don't, don't. For me, writing is the thing you get better at by doing lots of writing. And so obviously I write books, but I write a daily email. I have two daily emails. I write articles. I'm always trying to think, how is this thing that I'm doing over here making me better at the important thing that I have to do? But the other way to think about it is think about a comedian.

8:05right? A comedian gets great by the amount of stage time that they have, right? So it's, or an athlete, the amount of reps that you have. Reps in practice matter, of course, but so do reps, like, in a game. This is why they give players garbage time minutes, just to figure out how you perform when it's real, when the pads are off or on, or however you want to think about it. One of the things I think about is, like, this pertains to obstacles, is, like, let's say I have to let someone go, or let's say I have to have an unpleasant conversation with someone, or, you know, let's say I have to do something that I don't like doing.

8:37I just, one of the ways I get through that as I go, this is practice for those kinds of things, right? So this is practice for, I'm going to have to have an even more uncomfortable conversation about letting someone go 10 years from now. How am I going to be prepared for that? It's going to be because I've done it a lot of times before now and then. And so whenever I'm going through stuff, even you know, something like a pandemic or, you know, you have some medical issue, it's like, hey, this is toughening me up. This is practice. And so the decision to be present, to really think about what you're doing, to not just sort of go through it in autopilot is a way, I think, to become better at it, to actually use that time.

9:18If, you know, if you're a comedian and you have a thousand hours of stage time, but you're just sort of coasting through it, that's not going to be the same as someone who for 500 hours really consciously prepared and thought about it and debriefed and looked at it. So I think while we don't live in such an artificial universe as an athlete or, you know, an artist or something, we can decide that what we're doing is practice for something in the future. At the very least, it's practice for a more difficult future. And by surviving this and getting through whatever this is, we're better for having gone through that experience.

9:58Thank you. How much time and energy then do you spend or do you see other greats spend looking at the past? How well did I do that conversation? How well did I write that book? How well did I make that business decision? Do you spend it? Because there's obviously a school of thought that says, you know, drop the past, right? Just keep moving forward. So do you or do you see others spend a lot of time or the Stoics like spend a lot of time on the past? I interviewed a NASCAR driver, Brad Keselowski, on my podcast a few months ago. And he was he was I was talking to him about this. And he was saying that he'd just been reading a book, which I bought.

10:35I haven't read yet called Debrief to Win. The idea that you have to debrief after each thing. And I was asking him about his practice. He was like, I even watch every interview that he does. He watches the interview after not because he likes watching himself. He's like, I hate it. But he's like, I watch film of everything that I do. And I think that's one thing you see across all sports. And in the military, it's obviously not as film. But the idea of like, we're going to break this down to the millisecond. What could I have done here? What could I have done here? Look at how I screwed up there.

11:05So the idea of watching film is really, really important. Pete Carroll talks about this too. He even, at the end of the year, he forces his coaches to watch film of them on the sidelines coaching games. like it forces them through the same unpleasant process that the players go. Because I think often we think of it going a certain way, but to everyone else, it was really different. So I think, yeah, breaking down what you're doing, really look at it. How could that have gone better? Where do we screw up? I think the premeditatio malorum is great. You know, the premeditation, the pre-mortem, but you also got to do the post-mortem.

11:59Thanks 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 and I'll see you next episode.

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