When The World Got Still | Ask DS

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1:05I got an amazing night's sleep last night. One, because my six-year-old fell asleep in the car at like six o 'clock and he transferred him from the car seat to the bed and it stuck, which is just magic. So he's in bed way earlier than normal. But I sleep really well every night because I have a 8Sleep Pod 5 Ultra, which is 8Sleep's best product. I've used 8Sleep for many years now. And it's just totally transformed how I sleep, made me sleep better, made my wife sleep better. It's amazing. So basically, Eight Sleep is this topper that goes over your mattress. It can heat and cool both sides separately.

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2:40Welcome 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.

3:23When the world got still, it seems like forever ago and just last month. You were going about your life. You had work projects. You had plans for your kids' upcoming spring break. You were getting excited for March Madness. You were thinking about the latest political controversy, gossiping with your friends about celebrity news. You were busy. Things were noisy. Everything was moving fast. Then suddenly it came to a screeching, unprecedented stop. The world locked down. As we said before, life can get narrow real quick. It was a global pandemic, but your concerns were very local. Your family, your health.

3:59How would you get groceries or even toilet paper? It was anxiety-inducing and scary, but there was also a stillness in it because you were forced against your will to truly practice stoicism. Not just in the sense that you had to persist and act despite that fear, because people and things were counting on you, but also because it was so clear what was in your control and what wasn't. You came face to face with undeniable reality, overwhelming events, and all you could do was focus on your response. You had to practice what Epictetus called the art of acquiescence, ditching all those plans, accepting all the costs, the hits to your portfolio, the lost time, the inescapable human frailty and mortality we all wish to deny.

4:39And within this, you also had to do and be good for yourself, for your family, for your community, because your individual decisions had clear and unavoidable consequences for other people. It was a moment of stoicism, a moment made for stoicism, as all crises are. You survived, obviously, or you wouldn't be reading this, but now the world has gone back to normal, whatever that means. Things are noisy and busy again. Life is moving fast again. How much of that stoicism has drifted away as well? That's the real question. Because stoicism is not just for crises, but also for the everyday life. It's for the right now too.

5:14It's today that you need to be focused on what's in your control. It's today that you need to practice acceptance and practice memento mori. It's today that you need to think about your community. It's today that you need to find the stillness, even as the world is spinning faster than ever. Good luck.

5:35I've been thinking of that email for a long time, just how quiet and still and calm the world was. And it's funny because I just put out Stillness is the Key in the fall of 2019. So I was just sort of coming off that tour and starting to get serious about what I was going to do next, the writing that I had to do. And now four years later, Stillness is the Key, which at number one on the New York Times bestseller list is for sale as an e-book right now for$1.99. My publisher just let me know. So I decided to pair it with that email, which is pretty cool. And you can grab it anywhere. E-books are sold, Amazon, whatever.

6:15I'll put a link in today's show notes. And then actually we have something else really cool. Hang on one second. I'm going to walk over to my door where I left my keys because. Hope you can hear that. One of the things about owning a bunch of old buildings is you've got a bazillion keys. But the key that I use to open my office every day says stillness on it. We made this cool. Stillness is the key. I didn't know you could make keys this way, but the key is like a rock and it has waves crashing over it. That was Marcus Rios' image. He says, be like the rock that the waves crash over and eventually the sea falls still around.

6:52That was the stoic image for that word ataraxia, freedom from disturbances, sort of a poise, a dignity, a self-containedness. And I think about that every single morning when I open my office to sit down and write as I did this morning. It's this really cool, beautiful key. And we made them, I think, last year. And because the e-book is discounted, I thought I'd discount this too. You can grab The Stillness Is The Key key for 50 % off at store.dailystoic.com. Just use code STILLNESSISTHEKEY in all caps, and that should work. So check out the Stillness is the Key ebook. If you want a stillness key, you can grab that at store.dailystoic.com, and I'll link to it in today's show notes.

7:47I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods. 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.

8:21You can also order online for pickup and even delivery in select zip codes to skip the crowds. Shop everything you need at Whole Foods Market, your holiday headquarters. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It's not my main criteria, but it is a really important one. So if you're ever thinking about having me come talk, obviously I think about whether I have the time, think about what's going on in my life, but I also think about can I bring my kids? It sucks to be gone and I hate being gone. and anytime I can work, but also bring the family along, I'm very excited.

8:51And so when I got asked to do this talk in San Antonio, I was like, it's not at the JW Marriott, is it? And they were like, yeah, it is. And I was like, I'm in, I'm in. Why am I in? Because this hotel has a water park, lazy river, and a bunch of awesome water slides. And I knew my kids would be very excited. And they had an amazing time. The leadership group that I talked to was great. I'm going to bring you a selection of some of the questions they asked me. But the memorable thing to me, as my kids still talk about, is we're climbing up the tower to the water slide, and my son starts talking about this raccoon.

9:26And I'm sort of like, uh-huh, sure, sure, there's a raccoon. And there was a raccoon. There was a raccoon living in the water tower, and it was just hanging out. And they talk about it all the time. They go, what do you think that raccoon's doing? I don't know. If anyone listening here knows about the raccoon or what it's up to, I'm sure my kids would appreciate the update. None of this has anything to do with the questions that I was asked by the group, I will say. I gave my normal talk on stoicism. We talked obstacle, ego, and stillness. Not bringing you that. Not bringing you anything about the raccoon.

9:56I am going to bring you some of the questions that the folks asked me. I thought they were great. I thought you might like to listen to them. And I wish I could have brought you a recording of the conversation I had before the talk. My friend Manu Ginogli came out. We talked stoicism a little bit before. We just sort of hung out and chatted. We had lunch actually by the pool, and then I went and did my thing. It was a fun, awesome experience. Thanks to the Cannonball Leadership Growth Conference for having me out. Thank you to you for listening. Here is the Q &A from that talk. Enjoy.

10:35Yeah, so for the Stoics, there's these sort of four virtues. There's courage, which I think is pretty straightforward. There's justice, which is pretty straightforward. Wisdom, which is straightforward. But discipline to me is the virtue under which all the other discipline, all the other virtues depend. Right. There's nobody great who became great who did so, I think, without a kind of a discipline. But then also what I think is so powerful about discipline is it makes whatever you're doing great. Right. If you're sweeping floors with discipline and dedication and purpose, that becomes great.

11:06Right. if you're president or your chief of staff like Marshall was, and you can be disciplined about your ego, about yourself, about the job in front of you, it makes that great. And so to me, discipline is the sort of key variable for all the things we want to do and be in life. And it has to be a thing that we're cultivating. As we become successful, as we are lucky to live in a time of plenty and abundance and relative freedom, the fact that other people aren't telling us what to do, right, means we have to tell ourselves what to do, that we have to set the standards and practices, the bright lines that we observe and follow and sort of live according to.

11:50I love that. I was on a run this morning with Meredith who was training for her first marathon in three weeks. And I said, one of the things I've been so enamored with is her discipline to get up when nobody's looking, nobody's watching. What is it? What is what instead of like, let me go another way. How, why are people so undisciplined? Well, no, I think the physical practice is such a great place to cultivate discipline. And I think it's transferable, right? Like nobody makes you sign up for a marathon. Certainly no one's checking whether you're training or not, you have to do that. You have to say, it's important to me to do this.

12:26I have to do it every day. Here's the plan I set for myself. Here's how I have to follow it. And you realize if I don't do it, I'm not going to get what I want. The results aren't going to be there. I'm going to embarrass myself in front of my friends or whatever it is. So to be able to do that is a really important skill. And I think people who can cultivate, when we talk about hobbies, I think having hobbies that help strengthen your discipline are really, really important. So like, obviously what I do is a lot of sitting in a chair thinking. And so to have a physical practice where I also cultivate discipline helps me, you know, when I'm struggling to be able to go, I've been in this, I've been halfway through a run that was not going well, where I wanted to quit.

13:06And I've cultivated the ability to stop myself from quitting and keep going. Right. And so I think you have to cultivate a practice from discipline in your life. I don't know why people don't have discipline. I mean, I guess the simple answer is that discipline is hard and people are not great. The irony is that discipline is hard now, but the rewards later are great. And the converse is also true. Eating whatever you want, doing whatever you want, not having standards feels easier now. And then you wake up one day and you look in the mirror, or you wake up and you look at your life and you're not what you want to be or where you want to be, you know, that's not great.

13:48And the Stoics and the Epicureans, although they were ostensibly these opposite schools, they had a lot in common in the sense that they believed that a pleasure that had consequences was not really a pleasure. So if you guys get super drunk tonight at the hotel bar and then you wake up in the morning and you feel miserable because you're hungover, was it really that great? Right? Those aren't two separate things. That's one thing. And so the ability to sort of I think one of the key elements of discipline, why a lot of people don't have is they're not good at cause and effect and they're not good at delayed or lagging indicators and tying things together.

14:26Yeah, I love that. So the idea is, you know, I think you've probably heard of the marshmallow test. It starts early. Delayed gratification. Delayed that gratification and suffer through the suck now to have what I want or become who I want to become later. Yes, exactly. And for people who don't know the marshmallow test, it's, you know, do you want one marshmallow now or two marshmallows in 15 minutes? And people are really bad. They'll just shove that first marshmallow in their mouth, maybe because they want it really bad. Or they, I think the other part is, and this is where sort of social privilege and other things can get in the way, is like they don't trust that there'll be a second marshmallow later.

15:04They don't trust the system. They don't trust the process. Like on discipline, I hit this sort of wall early on. I wasn't, I knew what I wanted to write about, but I didn't know if I had the material and I was struggling and I was confused. But I've been in that, like I was saying, I've been in that place a lot of times, not just physically, but with my other books. like never when you start a book are you like i know exactly what this is exactly where it's going and obviously it's going to work you always have these dark nights of the soul you always have these you know what paul graham calls the trough of despair the after the excitement the oh crap is this going to happen but i've been through the process enough that i trust it i know if i do what I'm supposed to do today enough times, I'll get there.

15:48Like if you, as a coach, like if you, you've walked people through running a marathon, you know, that at first it seems impossible that you could physically do 26 miles, but if you can do one mile and then you can get yourself up to you know, you, you, you've seen it work enough times. Yeah. That you have the confidence to go just follow this and you'll get there. Yeah. I love that. All right. So I want to ask a couple questions, but one, one, one more question. So besides discipline is a destiny. Yeah. Your favorite book that you've written. That is a very tough question. Um, I think every one of the books was what I needed at that moment.

16:25So when I was writing stillness, I was way too busy, way over, over committed. It's what I really needed. When I wrote ego is the enemy. It was after my first book had really popped. And I was in this place of like, you know, they, they were making a TV show about me. There was all this awesome stuff. And I was like, if you want to keep doing this and not spin off the planet, you know, ego is what you got to think about. And, and, you know, obstacle was a different place. So I think every one of the books is something that I needed at the time. But I wrote a book a few years ago called Conspiracy, which is about the billionaire Peter Thiel and this sort of insane thing he did.

17:01But I am proudest of it because it was the most radically different than all my books. And so even though actually it probably has sold the fewest copies of any of my books. I grew the most for having written it. And when I do books, I try not to, I try to very deliberately decouple my sense of whether something worked or not, or was successful or not from how other people thought it was. So I almost deliberately choose the one that sold the least amount of copies so that like, I have a kind of compass that is based on what I think and what I do and how it's going for me, as opposed to, you know, what the market thinks.

17:45Because I think everyone's experiences where you're like, you worked your hardest on something and it just didn't go the way you thought it would go. Then you did this other thing, you dashed it off in two minutes and it crushed. And then if you, but if you identify too much with that success, you've now taught yourself a dangerous lesson. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Okay. So you worked with Robert Greene. Yeah. What was the biggest thing you've learned from him? You've learned in your time with him? So Robert Greene, I think, is one of the great nonfiction writers of our time. Maybe the greatest living nonfiction writer, like in the space that sort of the self-help and sort of business space.

18:26I mean, most practically, like he taught me like how a book is made. Like I learned the process from him. Like it showed like the picture of me with my note cards. Like I learned from him, like you have an idea, how do you get the material to make that idea real? And he showed me like the building blocks of the thing. And I think so often, you know, we want someone to make an introduction for us, or we want someone to give us a break or give us a jar or whatever. What I actually learned from Robert was like the nuts and bolts of the craft itself, like how you do a thing, which I use every day, you know?

19:03And so I think, I think mostly from Robert, it was about the power of craft. And Robert wrote an incredible book called mastery, which I would recommend to everyone here. Like, how do you decide, not just like, I want to be good at something, but he says, like, you find what your life's task is, what you're put on this planet to do, and then how you become a perpetual student and, you know, hopeful, but never in practice master of that domain. Yeah, unbelievable. He is. He is. It's amazing, though, because he is one of the to your point, one of the greatest thought leaders and thinkers ever. For sure.

19:40And definitely in our age. And you're now following in his footsteps in that in that same in that same space. I mean, I think it's really important not just to have a mentor in your career, which he was for me, but kind of like a model or like an exemplar of what greatness looks like to you in your profession. so who's the greatest to ever do what you've done and maybe not just the most successful or made the most money or had the most clients or the most impact but like the person who you know is those things and a good person or and you know and a positive contributor to the world or and a good like who is the model of those things for you so you can kind of have for Marcus Aurelius his model was Antoninus, his stepfather.

20:25He sort of always had him in mind as a sort of model of the perfect life. And so he could ask himself, you know, like, what would he do in this situation? And I think for Robert, he's not just like a mentor to me who showed me how to do something, but more importantly, he sort of modeled it. And it's really helpful for me to be like, okay, here's, here's how someone I really admire would make the decision or would approach this decision that's being in front of me. Like when early on in my career, um, I got an offer for a book deal, uh, maybe like 22 years old. Um, like the thing I wanted more than anything.

21:06And I went to Robert and, um, uh, he was like, you should say no. And I was like, what, this is like, this is what I want. And he's like, he walked me through, he's like, you'll be more ready in a few years. He's like, I don't think the deal terms of this are right. He's like, I don't think you have the experiences yet to do this. You know, you sort of walk me through why to say no. And I did. And it was obviously terrifying and, you know, really hard. And I could have only done it on the advice of someone I trusted that much. But, you know, now when I make decisions, I like I want to have the experience of like walking away from this big, scary thing early on.

21:41but two i have oh like people who know what they're doing don't just accept everything that's offered to them don't just jump on like they he really modeled that and worked through that with me and you know that changed not just my career in that instance but like all the decisions that i made subsequently awesome i just listened to uh interview with um ed my let yeah sat down with and i encourage all of you to go listen to ed my last latest podcast he just interviewed ryan holiday and great conversation. Thank you. Yeah, it was really cool. Great conversation. All right. Before I take some audience questions, you mentioned your bookstore.

22:18Yes. What is the name and where is it now that you're in? We have a lot of people from Texas. Yes. Where is it and what's the name? So the bookstore is on Main Street in Bastrop, Texas, which is about 70 miles from here. It's about 30 miles from Austin and it's called the Painted Porch, which stoicism, stoa means porch and it was named after what's called the stoa pochile or the Painted Porch in Athens. So it's, it's, uh, my little bookstore slash office slash headquarters. And, uh, it's been quite a ride. Well, make sure you check it out. Make sure you follow, uh, uh, Ryan. He has some amazing guests.

22:53Peter Atiyah is a good friend of yours. And if you don't know who Peter Atiyah is, he is the Ryan Holiday when it comes to health. I'm saying the guy is Peter's great. One of the smartest human beings ever. He has a great podcast called The Drive. And when those two collaborate together, it's, it's magic.

23:11Thank you.

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