You Can’t Be Fragile Like This | Ask DS

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2:20That's givewell.org, code The Daily Stoic to donate or find out more. Welcome to The Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics. 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.

3:00Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

3:10You can't be fragile like this. Cato, one of the most vaunted and towering Stoics, built a reputation and a career out of his refusal to give an inch in the face of pressure. He fought to keep Rome as it was, as it always had been, and he refused political compromise in every form. Cato was Cato, and he could never be anything but rigid and upright and strong. But Cato's inflexibility did not always best serve the public good. Indeed, no one did more than Cato to rage against the Republic's fall, but few did more to bring that fall to pass. When Pompey, one of Rome's greatest generals and political forces, sought an alliance by proposing marriage to one of Cato's relatives, Cato's dismissive refusal led Pompey to ally with Caesar instead, and their combined strength led to a radical shift in Rome's politics, overturning the long-standing traditions that Cato wanted to uphold.

4:02His refusal to compromise, his inflexibility, while driven by moral principles, ultimately ended in crushing defeat. We recently talked about Robert Greene's answer to the question, what is the most stoic law of power? Robert's answer that the main law is to have power over yourself, and that idea seeps into each of the 48 laws of power, is actually captured in law 48, assume formlessness. except the fact that nothing is certain and no law is fixed, Robert writes. The best way to protect yourself is to be as fluid and formless as water. While we can admire the high integrity and uprightness of the Cato's of the world, the truth is that the unflexible, the uncompromising, pure person who cannot adjust, who cannot conceive of doing things anyway but their own is extremely fragile.

4:49We have to be able to be flexible, to change, to adapt. In a world filled with chaos and uncertainty in change, the Stoics said we must cultivate the ability to be adaptable, resilient, and in harmony with the ever-changing currents of life. In a great exchange between Epictetus and one of his students, the student says, tell me what to do. And Epictetus says, it would be better to say, make my mind adaptable to any circumstances. Rigidity is fragile. Formlessness is unbreakable. If you want some lessons from the master on formlessness, You can come see Robert Green and I in conversation, sharing a stage, talking for a couple hours.

5:29Very soon, we're going to be talking live in Los Angeles on the 19th of September and live in Seattle on September 21st. He's one of my favorite people in the world. You've heard him on this podcast many, many times. If you want to ask him questions, if you want to come to the VIP meet and greet, if you want to see Robert and I do what we do, it's going to be a unique special show in each spot. never to be seen before or again. And I'm really excited to do that. You can grab those tickets at ryanholiday.net slash tour. I'll link to it in today's show notes. But I hope to see you all in person in September, Seattle and Los Angeles, ryanholiday.net slash tour.

6:09Come see Robert Green and I do what we do and learn some formlessness.

6:27Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. We're doing a Q &A today that's actually drawn from the Stoicism 101 course. I think it's one of the best courses we've done over at Daily Stoic. If you're looking to get introduced to Stoicism, you want to take your study of it to the next level. You want to go back to basics or you want to build a really good foundation of what Stoicism is and how you can use it. That's what the course is about. I'll link to that in today's show notes. But this is drawing from one of the many Q &As we've done as part of the session. People got to come in and ask me a bunch of questions.

7:00That's where today's Q &A is coming from. It's just a selection. And I hope you join us in Stoicism 101. You can ask some of your own questions. I'll link to that in today's show notes or just type in Stoicism 101 in the Daily Stoic store. Hey, thanks for calling on me, Ryan. Of course. I'm really happy I got to join this one. I'm at work and I've been kind of going back and forth. Oh, awesome. Thanks for having me. I heard about you. Somebody, I think it was on ESPN, was talking about Nick Saban and Bill Belichick being fans of Obstacle of the Way. So I went out and got a copy and I love it. So my question, somebody had mentioned the similarities between Buddhism and Stoicism.

7:40I'm seeing a lot of similarities between Stoicism and 12-step literature and recovery. Um, one major difference that I, that I see is the idea of the will. Right. So in stoicism, it seems like you need a strong will. Yeah. You need to be diligent. You need to be, um, you know, on top of your every action where in 12 step, it's the idea of the will is what gets us into problems. Right. And we have to turn our will over. So is turning the will over in Stoicism just a dedication to the four virtues? I think, you know, that's that's an interesting question. And and I think it's complicated. Right.

8:23I definitely get the idea in both in Buddhism and in and in 12 step, the sort of the willful will, your sort of sense that you're the center of the universe, that this is all about you. You know, that that is what gets us into trouble. At the same time, I would argue the Stoics probably agree with that. And I say this in obstacle. When we think about will, we often think willpower. But I think for the Stoics, a big part of will was that idea of acceptance, of sort of accepting one's powerlessness over a situation and bringing your willpower to the endurance side of things rather than the assertion side of things.

9:06So I would I think they're probably more aligned than than it might seem. Yeah. I mean, there's some phrases that just jump out at me. Progress, not perfection. You know, yeah. The serenity prayer is straight out of the four virtues. It sounds like it is amazing. Definitely is. All right. Well, thank you. Of course. No, thank you. Well, I think this was covered a little bit earlier. you're talking about uh the easiest way to kind of get into those uh deep work states those flow kind of states is doing what you like but obviously in like pursuit of doing the things you love uh you're gonna run into things that you don't like doing so like i'm sure you love running the daily stoic and doing your writing but i'm sure you deal with like suppliers or whatever and maybe like the business side of things isn't your favorite part or something.

10:04I'm just spitballing. For me, like being a student, like I love learning about some of these things I do, but then I may have to take a course that I don't really like. Sure. And so how do you like still do that deep work when it's not something you want to do? Because obviously there's going to be times like that. Yeah. I did a video about this, I think over the weekend that was helpful to me. I first heard the phrase from Tim Ferriss. I don't know if he invented it or not, but the idea is like sort of make before you mention, or sorry, make before you manage. And so to me, the idea is like, I do the creative sort of flow oriented tasks first, and then I do the other stuff later, right?

10:51So like sort of, I try to think about it's like the first half of the day is for the creative stuff. The second half of the day is for the administrative stuff. So I don't want to burn myself out and then have to go do the important thing. I want to have already done the important stuff because if the administrative task takes an extra day, so be it. But if I'm putting off the important stuff, maybe I'll never get that moment again. All right. Yeah, that's helpful. I appreciate it. Great. Thanks, Ryan. Yeah. I was introduced to you a while ago with stillness. a bunch of us at work were reading it and then I took me into a bunch of your other books and I've read some of the novels you recommended like um hurricane and the banana king and I'm reading a man in full right now you've got the sessions here now we've got a couple of emails that come out every morning and literally for the past few days I've had a I've had a headache and I'm I'm wondering, like, I think it's information overload.

11:51I'm eating up a lot of, I'm loving it, but I'm also finding it's too much right now. And so any advice on how to pare back? I don't want to get burnt out, but I think I need to pare back. But you provide so much content at the same time. You know, it's like, how do we pick and choose? And what do you do? A lot of your chapters are short chapters. So I think, you know, that's intentional. So it's a great question. All the stuff I put out is not really supposed to be consumed by one person. Right. So the idea is that different people consume in different mediums. Some people like video, some people like audio, some people like email, some people like books.

12:36The idea is I put a lot of stuff out there and I hope that people, a small percentage of it reaches each person, right? So definitely pick and choose what you like, what fits into your life, what is the medium that's most conducive to your learning. but I would say I get to that place too where there's just too much, you're too busy, you're fried, you're realizing that retention is not there. I think the best thing you do there is you step back. You take a minute and you allow yourself to recover. This goes to the point we're talking about as far as recovery goes, right? If you're not resting and recovering, you're probably at some point of diminishing return.

13:19So I, I, I definitely think about that. Um, although I heard a good piece of advice the other day where someone was saying, like, if you ever get to a place where you're too tired to do anything, but scroll on your phone or watch TV, you should go to sleep. Like the point is to go to sleep, not to just stay up and do more mindless activities, but to go to sleep. So usually when I find myself at that place, I try to remind myself, like, this is probably even deeper than just like not reading. This is like, I'm not taking care of myself and I need to literally go to bed and start over the next day or the next week or whatever.

13:57I wonder how many people are actually struggling with that now. Cause I, I do the number of times my kids wake me up on the couch or my lights still on in my room, all that sort of stuff. Yeah. Totally.

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