You’re Never Going to Be Perfect | Ask Daily Stoic

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're never going to be perfect. We have goals, we have standards, we have what we know we need to do. And then discipline, that key stoic virtue, determines whether we do it or not. The problem is that some people seem to think that this discipline must be ironclad, and then they beat themselves and they fall short. The Stoics had high standards. They had important jobs. They had a lot they needed to do. They also understood that perfection was not possible. What was possible, Epictetus said, was striving to be better. What mattered, Mark Shreya said, was how quickly you picked yourself up after you were jarred by circumstances.

0:54Ryan Holiday: Sometimes we'll fall short. Sometimes we'll have to make an exception. Sometimes we'll just plain forget our training and our standards. But it's like that famous line in Steinbach's East of Eden, which has a bunch of stoic themes, actually opened the Four Virtues series with a line from that. Adam Trask in the book, the character, he's been impossibly hard on himself. He's racked with guilt. And he's told by the family servant, Lee, And now that you know you don't have to be perfect, you can be good. And that's the point. We don't have to be perfect. We just have to choose to be good. We have that choice.

1:30Ryan Holiday: We can begin again. We can still fight through it. Good is better than perfect because it's real. Good is better than perfect because it's human. It's the striving, the effort, the genuine desire to do what's right. Good is what we are. And good is what we have to keep trying to be every day.

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4:19Ryan Holiday: Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Soap podcast. We're going to flash forward actually this back in time because it's going to go back to March of 22, where I did a virtual talk for some FBI agents. They were on this strength and leadership retreat and I zoomed in. I gave a little talk and then I answered a couple of questions. And again, it's always interesting to me to see different people and how they relate to stoicism, what they take out of it, what they're thinking about. And again, I think whether I'm talking to school teachers or FBI agents, elected leaders, or I'm talking to school kids, this is one of my absolute favorite things to do.

5:02Ryan Holiday: So hopefully these questions will resonate with you. I thought it was an honor to talk to this group again march 22 seems like absolutely forever ago but here we are here is that q a and i'll uh i'll get right into it you talked about we can't control our outcomes uh we can control our our reactions yeah i was learned you talked about that for a couple minutes to me that's the definition of stoicism that we don't control what happens in the world but we control how we respond to what happens in the world right when i when i talk to sports teams i say some version this is It's like, look, the only thing you control is how you practice and how you play.

5:39Ryan Holiday: Everything else is up to someone else. You don't control what the weather of game day is going to be. You don't control whether you start. You don't control whether the coach hates you. You don't control what the media is saying about you. You don't control if the refs suck, right? You don't control any of it. You control what you do on this play right now, right? You control what you do. So for the Stoics, the idea is like, look, I control my emotions. I control my thoughts. I control the actions that I'm going to take within the constraints of what's been, you know, sort of presented in front of me, like what the situation is.

6:09Ryan Holiday: But that's it. And so having this more circumscribed notion of what's up to us and not up to us seems limiting, but it's actually really empowering. If you take for granted that most people spend an inordinate amount of time and energy focused on what other people are saying, what other people are thinking, right? Whose fault it is, right? What it means, right? What caused it? All of this is rejecting the limited agency in front of you, which is, you know, what am I going to do right now? What am I going to do about it? So to me, that's what stoicism is. It's this sort of zooming in on what's up to me.

6:45Ryan Holiday: And that's where I'm going to focus all my energy and thoughts because everything else is wasted. Oh, thank you. As you were talking about stillness and I'm not a particularly religious person, but I go to church pretty much every week. and I try to make that a priority for my family. And it occurred to me only recently that that's a space for me where my mind can contemplate things in a way that I don't do all week long. Yes. And really try to protect that time. And it never really occurred to me why that is until we were just talking. So that's very much that space for me. No, I love that, right?

7:18Ryan Holiday: It's a place where it's rude to be on your phone, right? You're not talking, you're just listening. It's also, you know, depending on where you go to church, It's usually a building designed to sort of engender that, to create a sense of awe and wonder. I mean, how rare that silence is. And then I think we need to carve out blocks of that because that's where ideas pop into our head. That's where we get clarity. That's where we calm down. I think we need those experiences if we want to access all parts of our toolkit. So one of the other topics we're going to be discussing today is typical conversations with people as leaders often.

7:58We have tough challenging conversations, whether we're talking about some of these formats or maybe on the right. How would a scope approach that? What advice would you have from your study on those typical conversations?

8:11Ryan Holiday: Well, one of the things I've been thinking about that lately is like, you know, you got to let's say you got to let someone go. You have to give someone some unpleasant feedback, whatever it is. I try to remind myself that the only way to get good at that is by practice doing it. So as much as I would rather not be doing it, I just try to remind myself that it's practice. Right. So I try to go into it going, OK, I've only fired three people in my life. This is the fourth one. Right. So when I have to fire my 10th person 20 years from now, I'll be better for having gone through this. To me, that's kind of what the idea of the obstacle is the way is that these unpleasant, unchosen, undesirable situations are practice for harder things down the road.

8:56Ryan Holiday: Right. So if we can go into it not being like, oh, I can't believe I have to do this. This sucks. This is unfair. This isn't going to be this isn't going to be fun. I try to go, okay, I need practice calling up, maybe for me, it's my publisher. I have to call and have a frank conversation with my publisher about something that's not going well. I could shy away from that. I could see if someone else could do it for me. I could pretend I don't need to do it and just see if it magically resolves itself. Or I can go, okay, tomorrow I'm picking up the phone and I'm going to do it and I'm going to be better for having done it.

9:35Ryan Holiday: That's kind of how I think about those things. So Ryan, you talked about the importance of personal hobbies. Yeah. And to reflect, I think, at least for me, the work-life imbalance creeps up on you. Sure. Any thoughts on recognizing the signs that we're not taking the time to reflect and how to make sure we do carve that time out? Yeah, I think those hobbies can kind of be a good canary in the coal mine that you're getting imbalanced. Like, let's say it's, you know, maybe your activities are physical or maybe you like working in your workshop or you like doing X, Y, or Z. when you haven't been able to do those things because you literally haven't had the time, your work-life balance is probably a bit skewed.

10:18Ryan Holiday: Obviously, all of us at different phases in our careers, different jobs, different things, the amount of time or whatever is going to be different, but maybe coming up with some non-negotiables like, hey, once a week, I need to be able to do X or three times a week, I need to be able to do Y. If I'm sacrificing those things, not doing those things, it's because I've become in balance. And that might seem like I'm being respectful to my career. But in fact, if I want to do this thing for a long time, I have to be able to be almost more disciplined about my discipline. You know, we think about great athletes.

10:55Ryan Holiday: We have this vision that they just work all the time. You know, it's Kobe Bryant waking up at four in the morning or, you know, Tiger Woods hitting however many practice shots, whatever that is. But in truth, the number one cause of injury, the number one career ender for professional athletes is overtraining, right? They get burned out or they push themselves too far and they hurt themselves in a way in which they can't come back. And so, you know, realizing like, hey, I don't just want to be good at this this week, but I want to be good at this 15, 20, 30 years from now, it requires pacing yourself and having some self-control in that sense.

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