You Fought The Wall and the Wall Won | When Self-Discipline Becomes a Vice

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: You fought the wall and the wall won. It was not the right time. It was not fair. It was going to mess up so much. It was going to hurt so bad. It was going to get in the way. That's why you dreaded it. That's why you were anxious about it. But ultimately, the recession, the hurricane, the hardship, it didn't care. It never does. It didn't ask for your opinion or take into account your needs. And it never will. At the core of Stoicism is this idea of acceptance. Not acceptance of everything, of course, but the acceptance of things that are not up to us. Why should we get angry at the world, Mark Srelius writes, cribbing from Euripides, as if the world would notice.

1:01Ryan Holiday: There are some things that are bigger than us. There are some things that will not yield to our efforts or our entreaties. We should not hurl ourselves against those things. We should not fight a wall, because the wall will always win.

1:22Ryan Holiday: hey it's ryan welcome to another episode of the daily stoic podcast as you know i just got back from that run of three dates i did a whole deep dive into the shenanigans there travel delays trying to be stoic in the midst of uh some craziness but the first stop was in minneapolis at the Ted Mann Concert Hall. Beautiful venue, amazing crowd. Really loved doing it. And the questions were great. They were really great. But I mean, one of them, oof. I'll play it last because it hit me so hard. I don't want you to tear up like I did right at the beginning. But this 10-year-old kid gets up and asks just a beautiful question, which, I don't know, just really hit me because I have a 10-year-old.

2:04Ryan Holiday: And I just think what a head start this kid is getting, turn into stoicism so early. I was honored. He sent me a really nice email after, and so did his dad. I got to meet him after the show. If you're wondering sort of how this panned out, I'll bleep out his name and stuff so people can't identify him because he deserves some privacy. But I think you'll really like this. There were a bunch of other questions, which I'll get to first. If you want to come ask me a question or if you have a 10-year-old who wants to ask me a question, I'll be in Auckland on October 13th, Sydney on the 16th, Melbourne on the 18th, Brisbane on the 20th, Perth on the 21st.

2:35Ryan Holiday: Just bought all the tickets. My whole family's going. Then I'll be in Boston on November 16th, Nashville on the 20th, right before Thanksgiving, and then Philadelphia in D.C. on December 8th and 9th. You can come see me, grab tickets at dailystoiclive.com. What would you say is the most important thing to focus on when you realize you have more life behind you than in front of you? I know we talk about Memento Mori. could you say what would be the most important thing to focus on? Thank you. Well, it's interesting, right? Obviously, at a certain point in your life, the actuary tables can give you evidence of that.

3:20Ryan Holiday: But any person could be at that point at any time and just not know it, right? The practice of memento mori is not, hey, you're going to die tomorrow, so what are you going to do differently? It's that anyone could die at any moment, and what does that change? What perspective does that shift? What prioritization does that give us? Seneca said that it's wrong to think of death as something that's in the future that we're moving towards. He says, actually, death is behind us, that the time that's passed belongs to death. Basically, his point is that we're dying every minute, dying every day. We're dying in terms of how we spend our time.

4:00Ryan Holiday: And his point, which he talks about repeatedly, his essay on the shortness of life is one of the greatest things ever written. He's saying that, you know, we protect our money, we protect property, we protect status, and then we just waste our time. You know, he says life is long if you know how to live it. The problem is we just waste too much of it. So I guess to me, it doesn't matter where you are in life, whether you're young or middle-aged or, you know, well-advanced in age. The question is, you know, what do you have to show for the time you've already had? And then what are you going to do with the time that you have left?

4:36Ryan Holiday: And those are the key questions that I think we should be asking ourselves, you know, theoretically, but also practically. And it's a philosophical practice. You know, hey, I don't know how long I have. I don't know what tomorrow is going to bring, but here's what I'm going to do today. Here's the changes I'm going to make now. That's what that philosophical practice of Memento Mori is really about. So a huge thank you. Your work and what you've done has forever changed my life in positive ways. So like a lot of people here, just a huge thank you. I was very curious in the Daily Stoic, I'll forever remember March 19th.

5:16there was, you quoted Father Anthony DeMello. And I think there's a really interesting convergence with spirituality and stoicism. And I was wondering if you could maybe just talk to that a little bit, especially regarding like a lot of DeMello's work around awareness and attachment and so forth. Thank you. Yeah.

5:37Ryan Holiday: Yeah. The Way to Love is a little book by Anthony DeMello. It's just absolutely incredible. Like Page for Page is maybe one of the greatest books you'll ever read. I think he's a Jesuit monk born in India, familiar with Buddhism and Catholicism, and just a fascinating guy. I do think there's a lot of overlap between the Eastern and the Western philosophy. Ultimately, I feel like they're kind of independently coming to some of the same conclusions about, you know, what causes suffering? What are the fundamental realities of life? what things sort of enslave and torture us and how do we free ourselves from them.

6:23Ryan Holiday: I don't know exactly how much they informed each other so much as I take it as a positive sign that wise people that I admire from different philosophical schools are expressing in their own way some of the same essential truths. And I think you see that when you read Confucius. I see that when you read Hudaism. I see that when you read, you know, Sermon on the Mount. I see that when you read the Stoics. And then the Epicureans who were in the ancient world considered these like diametrically opposed rivals who basically said the exact same thing with some small differences. So I think that's a really powerful sort of signal that they're on to something.

7:04Ryan Holiday: And Seneca talked about how, you know, he reads like a spy in the enemy's camp, that he'll read from any philosophical school, even if he disagrees with them. He wants to steel man his own arguments. And if somebody says something good, he's like, oh, he says, I'll quote a bad author if the line is good. And so I think there should be an open-mindedness, not just to all the different philosophical schools, whichever you ascribe to, but also we should be willing to update and add. We shouldn't act like 2 ,000 years of history and scientific studies and breakthroughs and, understanding of psychology hasn't been added to our store of knowledge, and we should let that inform our understanding and our practices as well.

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10:56When you were talking about courage and discipline, you talked about like moral courage and physical courage. I also think there's kind of moral discipline and physical discipline as well. Sure. My question when you were talking about like getting out of bed and asking like what controls you, like what's the thing that you're reaching for, the thing that you're running to, how are you balancing your practices of discipline without allowing those to become, you know, the things that control you to like your own personal detriment? Like when do your routines and your practices and your disciplines start to actually kind of overcome who you are as a person and how are you balancing that?

11:41Ryan Holiday: Right. The purpose of discipline is not to turn you into a machine. It's not to suck all the joy and fun out of life. It's not to, you know, account for every minute and every second and every calorie you're put here to live. You have one life. How are you going to spend it? I think when we think of discipline, yeah, it's not about this sort of torture you inflict on yourself. But it is understanding that oftentimes the things that feel good or we want or that we'll accept in the short term are often at odds with who we want to be and what we want to do in the slightly longer term, right? Like all success, all happiness, I find all contentment, all accomplishment is a lagging indicator of, you know, decisions we made long ago or work that we did long ago.

12:36Ryan Holiday: So the question is not like, hey, do I want to get out of bed early right now? But, you know, who do I want to be tomorrow and the day after and the day after? And is the choice I'm going to make contributing to that or not? And so I sort of think about it in that context. At the same time, we have to be disciplined about our self-discipline. Any virtue can be taken to an excess and becomes a vice. Just as too much courage becomes recklessness, too much discipline becomes, in a way, its own vice, its own form of ill discipline. And I think sometimes, like, this is a good problem to have. And it's a little bit like, you know, my biggest flaw is I just work too hard and care too much.

13:21Ryan Holiday: You know, but, you know, some people need more discipline to get up off the couch and some people need to sit on the couch and relax and recover because they did too much the day before or because they can't do it like they used to or they're, you know, coming down with something. And so the discipline to pace yourself is a really important one. I have a chapter in the discipline book about load management, which is something that the San Antonio Spurs pioneered and everyone in the NBA hated them for. but like you only get so many years you only get so many games you only have so many reps and if you're not diligent with that and you don't shepherd those resources properly you end up you know ironically getting hurt and missing more games and so that balance is is is key so ultimately temperance as a virtue is about finding that midpoint between the extremes and that that's the work.

14:22Ryan Holiday: It's easy to say, like, just do more, work harder, go faster, you know, add more things to the load. But that can be a recipe for, you know, disaster. I have really appreciated all that you've taught us about the obstacle being the way. And I'm curious how you approach when two things are true. You know the obstacle is the way, and that darn obstacle really hurts. Yeah. So you don't want that hurt to be masked or hold you back. So how do you navigate that? Yeah, I think there's obviously different kinds of obstacles, right? There's professional obstacles. It is worth noting the obstacle Mark Surrealist is specifically referring to in the passage about how the impediment to action advances action and what stands in the way becomes the way.

15:13Ryan Holiday: he's referring to annoying and obnoxious people who who screw up stuff for us so um you know his point is that other people are always an opportunity for us to practice a virtue and i think you know that that distinction can sometimes get lost because it's so easy to apply the formula to like professional endeavors like oh how does this you know how does the market today or this bit of news or this thing that happened, how do I use that to improve the bottom line or, you know, to grow the business or to, you know, get some attention or get ahead? There's obviously the other kinds of obstacles in life, you know, a diagnosis, call from a family member, something happening out in the world.

16:01Ryan Holiday: And when we say that the obstacle isn't the way, or we say the obstacle is the way, that's like not something I would say to someone who just told me they had cancer. It might be true. It's not what I would say to them. It seems like sometimes people will, you know, they'll order a copy of The Obstacles Away and say, you know, my friend just got this, you know, very serious cancer diagnosis. Can you inscribe, you know, this? I'm not going to tell that person amor fati. That just seems, you know, incredibly offensive. That doesn't mean it's not an opportunity for them to be great, you know, in the true sense of that word, in the sense of magnanimous and impressive and dignified and inspirational and, you know, peaceful and content.

16:49Ryan Holiday: There's always the opportunity to practice some virtue. It might also be at the same time, as you said, it's not mutually exclusive, incredibly painful and scary and sad and the exact opposite of what you would want to happen. And so when you look at the lives of the Stoics, you see that they're not being glib about this. These are people who were sent into exile. These were people who buried children. These were people who, you know, were robbed. These were people who were enslaved. These were people who were tortured. These were people who watched their beloved government be taken over, right?

17:25Ryan Holiday: They experience all sorts of pain and loss and difficulty. And when they say the obstacle is away. They don't just mean like, let's turn the have to to a get to, you know, it's something much, you know, much deeper and more profound than that. Right. And that's how that's to me, that's something harder to express, but is the sort of spiritual part of this philosophy that I think, you know, again, it doesn't make for a good or it does make for a good Instagram quote, but it's woefully insufficient for describing the amount of sort of spiritual soul power required to actually make that true in a given case.

18:06It's me and my dad here.

18:09Ryan Holiday: Where are you? Hey, bud. My parents recently divorced and you've been helping us a lot. And it's become one of our favorite things to listen to you. Sorry.

18:28And I just wanted to ask, what is one of your favorite quotes that probably not most people have heard or know of that just isn't very popular or well-known?

18:49Ryan Holiday: Well, I'm sorry to hear you're going through that. I think we know who's getting the book.

19:06Ryan Holiday: Um, let's, uh, let's find one here. Um, oh, this one's good. Okay. And maybe this applies to what you're going through. Not says frightened of change, but what can exist without it? what's closer to nature's heart? Can you take a hot bath and leave the firewood as it was, eat food without transforming it? Can any vital process take place without something being changed? Can't you see it's just the same with you and just as vital to nature? He says actually something similar to this later in meditations where he says, you know, you couldn't exist without change. Like, like you didn't exist and then you came into existence.

19:53Ryan Holiday: And then obviously we see that as a good change. And then all sorts of other changes we, we try to beat back the currents against like, uh, like Gatsby, or we try to resist, we try to fight, even though years in the future, we'll look back on whatever it is, including something painful, like you're going through. And we'll see it ultimately as something formative, something that shaped as something that we're proud that we figured out how to get through and we made it through. But there's a lot here. It's a book you read over and over again. And the book that I, you know, the book that I read when I was 19 years old, this one, is the same book that I just opened and read a passage to you now, but I understand it differently because I'm different.

20:36Ryan Holiday: The pages stay the same, but we change. And so I'll sign this for you after. I'll give it to you. And hopefully it's something that stays with you, all right? All right, it was great, bud.