You Have To Anticipate This Kind Of Behavior | Ask DS

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2:33Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are 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. Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

3:08Do you practice for rejection? Part of the reason we're afraid of things is that we're unfamiliar. We don't know what it's like to bomb on stage in front of people, but it seems bad, so we avoid any scenario where something like that might happen. We've been turned down or blown off once or twice, asking someone out, asking for help. And it was unpleasant enough that we've decided that we do not want to explore those feelings any further. We don't know or don't remember what it's like to be living paycheck to paycheck anymore. So we make our financial decisions accordingly. The result is that this uncertainty, this unfamiliarity looms large in our lives.

3:46It makes us conservative. It makes us keep to ourselves. It makes us struggle alone by ourselves. It turns us away from potential opportunities to meet someone new, to do something cool, to start our own thing. The famous philosopher Diogenes the Cynic was once seen begging for money from a statue. What on earth are you doing, someone asked. I'm getting practice and being refused, Diogenes replied. We've talked to a couple professional baseball players on the Daily Stoic podcast. Ian Happ and Scott Oberg are both two must-listens. We've talked to professional basketball players like Chris Bosh or Coutinho Mobley, entrepreneurs like Tim Ferriss and Rob Dyrdek.

4:24And one thing they'll all tell you is that a person who is afraid to strike out, afraid to miss, afraid to fail, is a person who will not succeed. Seneca actually practiced poverty once a month, trying to get up close and personal with want and deprivation. He said it was so that he could say to those fears of his, the fears that we all have of losing everything or taking a setback. So he could say to that risk aversion, is this what you so feared? When you practice deprivation or rejection, when you no longer fear embarrassment or messing up, then you have more energy to focus on the difficult tasks in front of you, and you are no longer hamstrung.

5:03And what you have is the most important virtue of them all, courage. Obviously, courage is the first of the four Daily Stoic Virtues. It's also what I write about in the new book, Courage is Calling, which came out, is that in 2021? If you haven't checked that out, it's the first in the Four Virtues series. It's followed by Discipline is Destiny. And that's also why I have the Four Virtues tattooed on my wrist, Courage being represented by the lion here on my left wrist. Anyways, Courage, something I'm working on, something I hope you're working on. And talk to y 'all soon.

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6:38Hey, 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.

7:10We're talking about some of Marcus Aurelius' stuff about being tolerant with others and strict with yourself, that we can't hold people to standards that they never asked for, and how you sort of think about your friend, how a Stoic thinks about their friend group, and how you try to be a positive influence. So that'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, and I'll link to that in today's show notes, or just type in Stoicism 101 in the Daily Stoic store. Hello, everyone. Hi. Fun fact, I was able to go to the Painted Porch bookstore over the weekend, and it's awesome.

7:50Thank you. And I love your shirt. Oh, thank you. I know you like Yes Theory, too. You're on the podcast. So my question was, I was reading Lives of the Stoic, and I noticed a passage where it compared Seneca to saying as if Emerson had also been a philosopher, a writer, a politician. And in today's email, it was, you know, comparing or just saying how Seneca was also a playwright. Zeno was a merchant. And so all these people had other trades that they worked with. So where I'm struggling is kind of finding a middle ground between maybe David Epstein's range, where you can dabble in a lot of things, and then Malcolm Gladwell's 10 ,000 hours, because a lot of us have so many interests, not just in work, but in life and how you juggle all of that.

8:37So two things. So I had David on the podcast and I think it's worth listening to. I love that book. There's also a handful of really good interviews with David and Malcolm where they sort of talk through their differences together, which they're like running buddies, which I think is hilarious. So I think it's a balance, right? if you're sort of only specialized in one thing, it makes you sort of very, you can be very good at it, but you're also sort of very fragile and vulnerable and you lack context. If you're doing a million things, you're lacking the ability to really get good at any of those things.

9:22When I look at Seneca, I see, you know, sort of being a politician, being a writer and being a, let's say, being a politician, being a philosopher and being a playwright as distinct but interrelated areas that we're making. So his experiences in the real world at the height of Rome's power and influence is obviously informing his understanding of the philosophy, just as the philosophy is informing his sort of obligations as a politician. Then I would say on top of that, when you read his plays, it's very clear to me that what Seneca is talking about in those plays are things that he's not free to talk about literally in his writing.

10:11So it's almost as if the plays were an outlet for what he's seeing and witnessing that he couldn't express in any other medium. So I guess it's not like, you know, he was a playwright and doing some completely unrelated thing that all the tasks are feeding into each other in some way. So I think if you can get a synergy going, it's better than if you're if you're doing things that are diametrically opposed to each other. So it's OK to do things kind of like in season, not everything at the same time. I think that's right. And then I guess the other thing to look at with Seneca would be where did he do those things at different phases in his life?

10:53A lot of his philosophical writings come after he's been exiled from politics, right? And even his plays, again, seemed to be things that he thought were important, but didn't have the ability to speak about, you know, because Nero was such a tyrant, that his plays were a way to sort of get those ideas out in the world, as opposed to just being a totally ridiculous, unrelated, you know, side project. Awesome. No, this is great stuff to think about. Thank you. Yeah. Hey, Ryan, thanks. Big fan of the board. So this parallels, I think, with today's email regarding success and also in the sense of learning the philosophy versus the daily application of the philosophy.

11:39And since obviously we have you in the spotlight, I'd like to ask, Where do you feel you yourself as a practitioner and obviously someone who probably knows is better than most people that walk the earth? Where do you really struggle? Where do you really feel like you fall short? And I, like you, I'm a father of I've actually got a six year old and just turned eight year old girl. So I'm walking that path, you know, myself. So I know that's probably in there somewhere. No, I would share some of that with us. Yeah, I'd say that's certainly at the top of the list. I don't think anyone who studies philosophy is then batting 100 percent with those ideas when you have kids, especially little kids.

12:21So and this, again, I think goes to the point of like, like, let's say you study philosophy and then you decide to live this kind of monkish life where, you know, you don't have any responsibilities. You don't have any kids. You don't have relationships. You know, in some respects, that makes the philosophy easier because you're not being challenged. At the same time, it makes a lot of the ideas kind of worthless because they're not actually rooted in any real experiences. And it makes it very hard for you to communicate these ideas with other people because, again, you know, you don't you don't exist in in the same reality, the same the same shared experiences as most people.

13:00So I would say, yeah, certainly kids and then where with kids probably being present, I would say, is a struggle. And then temper slash like, you know, sort of patience are probably the biggest challenges. And I was just working on something pertaining to Marcus Aurelius, and the writer was noting that the theme of getting angry appears so many times in meditations that it's impossible not to assume that Marcus Aurelius had a temper, right? And so I think it is important to note that the Stokes were not perfect, and perhaps the things they talked about most were the things that they were worst at.

13:47And you could probably deduce that from my writing as well. Anything you see that I'm talking about over and over again, you could kind of safely assume I'm talking about my own struggles with that same thing. Because what I think you're really doing with stoicism is you're trying to get your own thoughts, your own beliefs, your own principles sort of restated in as clear a form as possible. and it's in that way, it's just, it's like a reminder. Okay. Like, here's what, here's who I want to be. Here's how I want this to go. And then you're dealing with a grouchy four-year-old who's, you know, running around like a crazy person.

14:26You know, how can you actually sort of get those two things as aligned as possible? That's the struggle that we're all in for sure. Thank you. Thank you very much. Of course. all righty um joel asked about the stoics take on the law of attraction and um creating as opposed to reacting and accepting life as it is um understands that the secret is unrealistic but i do think there's something to the quantum field yeah i guess maybe just not enough information about this at the known time so there's a uh there is a line in meditations that maybe if you were really looking for confirmation of the law of attraction, which the law of attraction, as I understand it, is that like attracts like.

15:13What we think about, what we spend time sort of manifesting, what you put on a vision board, you're helping create into reality. So when Marx really says, our life is dyed by the color of our thoughts, it might seem like he's talking about the law of attraction, I would very much disagree with that idea. And the Stoics believe that our perceptions mattered, of course. And when Marx is saying that our life is died by our thoughts, I think he means like, if you're a depressive, pessimistic, negative person, you're going to see everything pessimistically and negatively. If you're a cynical person, you're going to see a lot to be cynical about.

15:59That doesn't have anything to do with what actually happens. And in fact, Marcus even talks about when he talks about sort of meditating on death, he says, you're not tempting fate. You're not manifesting death by thinking about death. You're quite the contrary. By thinking about death, you're creating a better life. to be flip about it. I think the law of attraction is horseshit. I think it's, it's sort of propagated by people who realize that it's a lot easier to sell books. If you tell people what they want to hear rather than tell them the truth. And in the article, I tell this funny story about I'm forgetting her name, but the woman who popularized the law of attraction and the secret several years ago, she was selling her mansion in Santa Barbara.

16:47It's like a$20 million mansion, which should give you some perspective on how much money there is and telling people that what they want to hear. Anyways, she lists the mansion for$20 million. It doesn't sell. So she relisted at 18. She relisted at 17. It ends up selling for like$11 million. And a reporter asked her, and I think this is the point, because if the law of attraction was real, why didn't you just manifest that your house would sell for full listing price? Right. The point being, our thoughts don't make reality, but our thoughts do inform the actions that we're likely to take. So the Stoics were big on the discipline of perception, how we see things.

17:31But that's kind of where the law of attraction ends things. The most important discipline for the Stoics is the discipline of of of action, what you actually do. And and that's that's I think what's going to be the most important.

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