You Have To Know Where You’re Going | with No Blame, Just Focus

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2:37Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

3:17You have to know where you're going. We know we want to go somewhere. We want to do something. We want to be successful. We want to win. We know we want to start something, whether it's a company or a creative project or a movement. Perhaps we want justice. We want someone to make things right. We want to change. We want to grow. We want to prove people wrong about us. We want to be happy. But what exactly or how? What exactly does that success look like? What is this happiness we speak of? Well, there we have a lot less clarity. Law 29 of the 48 Laws of Power, from the great Robert Greene, is plan all the way to the end.

3:56By the way, he and I are doing some talks together. I'll tell you about that at the end. In the law, he says, by planning all the way to the end, you will not be overwhelmed by circumstances and you will know when to stop. Gently guide fortune and help determine the future by thinking far ahead. Seneca actually said something similar many centuries earlier. He said,

4:47When our efforts are not directed at a cause or purpose, how can we know what to do day in and day out? When you haven't gotten really specific and clear about what you want and why, what it looks like, how could you possibly achieve it? How will you know what to say no to and what to say yes to? How will you know when you've had enough, when you've reached your goal, when you've gotten off track, if you've never defined what these things are? Just as the four virtues are the compass for a good life, so is good judgment and clear thinking the first step of getting from here to there. The reason that the Stoics were trained in logic and rhetoric and critical thinking, why they trained themselves to master their emotions, was so they would not fall into the trap of poor assumptions, impulsive decisions, and impossible goals.

5:30I feel like Robert trained me in that. That was my apprenticeship under him. So I'm really excited to announce that he and I are going to be live on stage together September 19th in LA, September 21st in Seattle at the Ebel Theater in LA, at the Moore Theater in Seattle. It's going to be awesome. There's some VIP meet and greet tickets if you want us to sign your books. You can ask us questions. we'll do an audience Q &A for sure he and I are going to be going back and forth like we have many many times but it's going to be live in awesome venues I'm really excited about we were supposed to do it in San Francisco plans got messed up we're rescheduling the show in Seattle so if you bought tickets it'll be good for that show you can grab tickets at ryanholiday.net or just pull it up on Ticketmaster I'll link to it in today's show notes I'm really excited me and Robert Green on stage together and then you in the audience.

6:26Hopefully people flew in, people are flying in from all over. I've gotten a bunch of emails about it. Should be really, really exciting. I will see you and Robert Greene in Seattle or Los Angeles the 19th and the 21st of September. Talk soon.

6:53No blame, just focus. This is today's entry, August 4th, in the Daily Stoic. You must stop blaming God and not blame any person. You must completely control your desire and shift your avoidance to what lies within you, your reasoned choice. You must no longer feel anger, resentment, envy, or regret. Epictetus' Discourses 3.22. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for resistance to the brutal apartheid regime in South Africa for 27 years. For 18 of those years, he had a bucket for a toilet, a hard cot, and a small cell. And once a year, he was allowed a single visitor for 30 minutes. It was vicious treatment meant to isolate and break down the prisoners.

7:39And yet, in spite of that, Mandela became a figure of dignity within the prison. Though he was deprived of many things, he still found creative ways to assert his will. As one of his fellow prisoners, Neville Alexander, explained to Frontline, Mandela always made the point, if they say you must run, insist on walking. If they say you must walk fast, insist on walking slowly. That was the whole point. We are going to set the terms. He pretended to jump rope and shadow box to stay in shape. He held his head higher than the other prisoners, encouraged them when times were tough, and always retained his sense of self-assurance.

8:13That self-assurance is yours to claim as well. No matter what happens today, no matter where you find yourself, shift to what lies within your reason choice. Ignore as best you can the emotions that pop up, which would be so easy to distract yourself with. Don't get emotional. Get focused. What I always find so amazing about the stories of Nelson Mandela, Ruben Hurricane Carter, Epictetus, James Stockdale, is not only how they managed to comport themselves, the dignity and poise and resistance and fortitude they underwent in the prison, which was incredible and a feat of human survival. But as I get older and I've experienced things and I've been slighted or wronged, frustrated, I'm even more impressed with how they behaved after.

9:05The forgiveness that they offered, the lack of resentment or bitterness that they carried, the way they brought people together. They could have come out of the prison like Bane in Batman, right? It could have been the origin of a villain story, right? But it was the opposite of that. You think even Martin Luther King, you think of the horrible things he underwent, you think of Gandhi, you think of how unjustly they were treated, how people took things from them, years that they would never get back, time with their family they would never get back, broke down their bodies in the way that Epictetus experienced under torture or Stockdale experienced under torture.

9:48You think of John McCain not being able to lift his arm a certain way for the rest of his life. They were deprived of so much, but they chose not to see it that way. Hurricane Carter famously doesn't ask for reparations after he leaves prison. He doesn't even want to admit that that had been taken from him. He was in control. And I just think of the incredible poise and strength and pride and all the stoic virtues. And I'm putting pride in there deliberately, like their carriage, this is who I am, you cannot break me. I decide. That to me is just the essence of stoicism. I hope none of us are ever tested in such a way.

10:28And I hope Stockton is the only one who tests Epictetus's theories in the modern world, in the laboratory, so to speak, at that level. But each of us, we have a period in a marriage, or we have a bad boss, or we have these periods of our life where we were subjected to something that we didn't like. And we could be angry about it. We could sow division afterwards about it. We could get even for it. But instead, we focus on our reason choice. We focus on being good and decent. We don't hang on to anger or resentment or envy or regret, as Epictetus says. But we maintain that dignity. We don't perpetuate the same injustices that were perpetuated upon us.

11:13And we show, as Mark Stavilla says, that the best revenge is to not be like that, to be better, to make a better world where hopefully something like what we just went through doesn't happen again, or at the very least doesn't happen because of anything that we say or do.

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12:48That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like the Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you a ad-free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free. No interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for.

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