Who Can Teach Us More? | Stick With Just The Facts

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:14Ryan Holiday: Who can teach us more? He had to rule over millions of people. He had to oversee millions of square miles. He had to command an army. He dealt with critics and sycophants. There were the downsides of fame, the burden of wealth. Marcus Aurelius had problems, big problems, but they were mostly problems of power. They were the problems of privilege. Epictetus also had problems. He had a terrible boss. He was exploited. He was exiled. He was kicked around. He was disabled. He was robbed. Epictetus' problems were the problems of powerlessness. He had real life problems. Epictetus can perhaps speak to us more than because he didn't live in a palace.

1:04Ryan Holiday: He wasn't born into privilege or money. He fought misfortune and adversity on other armies. He triumphed despite the cruelness of fate. And therefore, his lessons are far more relatable, even more urgent than Marcus Aurelius is. Real freedom in life, real power, Epictetus tells us, does not come from money or a throne. It comes from within. It's about mastering yourself. It's about resilience and determination and also about acceptance and self-knowledge. We don't control the role we were assigned by circumstance, but we do control how we play that role. Both Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus said this, but Epictetus made the most of a far more difficult as well as more realistic fate.

1:54Ryan Holiday: And that's why his teachings have survived and endured. That's why Stockdale drew on him in prison, and ordinary people have turned to him in the ordinary moments of frustration and stress in life. It's also why this month, our daily stoic, we're doing a deep dive into Epictetus. his life, his philosophy, his practical lessons for living with more resilience and less anxiety about the things we don't control in life. It would be wonderful if Epictetus was as popular as Mark's realist, but he simply is not. And he's intimidating to people and therefore a little bit more obscure. Well, we wanted to solve that.

2:33Ryan Holiday: And that's what we're doing with our How to Read Epictetus, a daily stoic digital guide. We're diving all into it. And we're gonna be doing a live Q &A call about it with thousands of other Stoics all over the world. I'd love to see you in there on August 27th, but that means you've got to sign up by the 26th. You can get a copy of Discourses for 50 % off. As I said, his work changed my life. I think it'll change your life. I can't wait to see you in there. Just go to dailystoic.com slash Epictetus to find out more, and we'll get into it. Talk soon.

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6:05Ryan Holiday: stick with just the facts this is an entry from the daily stoic 366 meditations on perseverance wisdom and the art of living you can grab a premium leather edition you grab signed editions at store.dailystoic.com our quote today is from marcus aurelius's 849 don't tell yourself anything more than what the initial impressions report. It has been reported to you that someone is speaking badly about you. This is the report. The report wasn't that you've been harmed. I see that my son is sick, but not that his life is at risk. So always stay within your first impressions. Don't add to them in your head.

6:45Ryan Holiday: And this way, nothing can happen to you. At first, this can seem like kind of the opposite of everything you've ever been taught. Don't we cultivate our minds and our critical thinking skills precisely so that we don't accept things at face value? Yeah, most of the time. But sometimes this approach can be counterproductive. What a philosopher also has the ability to do, as Nietzsche put it, is to stop courageously at the surface and to see things in plain objective form. Nothing more, nothing less. Yes, the Stokes are superficial, he said, out of profundity. Today, while other people are getting carried away, That's what you're going to practice, a kind of straightforward pragmatism, seeing things as their initial impressions make them.

7:31Ryan Holiday: I wrote this back in 2015 before I had kids. And there's something about having kids that really forced me to practice this better, right? Especially where he says, and I don't think it's a coincidence, Mark Stasrilis is talking about this, right? Because what you're constantly inclined to do as a parent is extrapolate. What does this mean? What if they keep doing this? What's going to happen next, right? And so he's saying, you know, my son is sick, but not that his life is at risk. And you can imagine for Mark Struis, who buries multiple children, what an anxious, worried mess this would have made him at the first sign of a cough or a sniffle or a fever.

8:08Ryan Holiday: Is this it? Is this the big one, right? The mind can run crazy because we can't just stick with things as they are. Part of us is extrapolating what they mean, how we're going to respond to this, what it's going to cost us with the worst case scenario. Psychologists call this catastrophizing. It's this tendency to not stick with things as they are. You know, your kid falls, right? They've fallen and you currently don't know anything else, but you're like, oh my God, there's going to be so hurt. They're going to be upset. They're going to cry. And then I'm going to have to comfort them. And then people are going to judge me.

8:39And then I got to go, right?

8:42Ryan Holiday: Or your kid smacks their brother and you go, if I don't nip this in the butt, if I don't teach them that this is wrong, They're going to think it's okay to hit him. And then they're going to do this. And then they're going to do this. And then they're going to do this. And then they're going to end up living under a bridge somewhere. And I'm going to be a failure as a parent. Everyone's going to judge, right? It's this running part of our mind. This is the part of the mind that Seneca was talking about when he said we suffer more in imagination than in reality. That's not to say that things are never serious, right?

9:10Ryan Holiday: That the sickness never results in serious sickness. that slander doesn't have consequences and that you might not have to speak up or speak out about things. Of course, it's just saying that that will reveal itself in due time. Part of our proactiveness, our on-top-of-it-ness is actually at a disadvantage because it's jumping to conclusions, right? The additional information will reveal itself. Let's pause. Mark Staviles tells us in another passage that we always have the ability to have no opinion. But maybe we could just say, Like that famous Zen expression about wait and see. Let's just wait and see a sec, right?

9:49Ryan Holiday: Let's wait and see a sec. Let's stick with the facts for now. Stick with what we know for now. Leave things as they are. Stay courageously at the surface. Don't delve beneath just yet. Don't run it through your machine that spits out the most likely scenario just yet. Stay superficial out of profundity. stay disciplined here. Get your mind in check. Get your assumptions in check. Don't let things race just yet. Calm down. Think about it. Look at it. Wait and see. Let it develop. And then go from there. And this isn't something I'm great at as a parent. It's something I'm struggling with that I'm continuing to look at, that I'm continuing to work on, as must you.

10:38Ryan Holiday: But I certainly catch myself when I'm not doing it, and I'm well aware of the consequences that it causes me. So that's today's message, and I'll talk to you all again soon.