You’re Not Dead Yet… | 9 Stoic Secrets For Self-Mastery (From Experts)

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2:34On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

2:48You are not dead yet. Marcus Aurelius was already quite old while writing meditations. He was sick and surrounded by the plague. Seneca was a marked man from the moment he left Nero's service. Yet as aware as these men were of their ticking clocks, they were also quite aware that they were not dead yet. Seneca wrote many of his most beautiful letters in those final years. Marcus Aurelius managed to bring meditations to the most perfect conclusion. He worked hard at his very important job. both managed to do good for their country, for their families, for themselves. While each of us can go at any moment, and some of us have been told distressing news by doctors, which gave us even more clarity about exactly how little time we may have left, this doesn't change the fact that we have this moment in front of us.

3:35In this moment, on this day, having woken up alive, there is so much that we can do. And as long as we are living, we can do our most important job, which Marcus defined not in a professional context, but as being and doing good. Someday you will be dead, but the good news is you are not dead yet. So how will you spend this day, this life? That is a question you can answer. That is something in your control. The one thing that all great people have in common is self-discipline. No one becomes great at what they do, at anything, without a strong command of themselves. Seneca famously says, in fact, that no one is fit to rule who has not first mastered themselves.

4:16So in today's episode, we want to talk about that. How do you cultivate the discipline, the self-command, the ability to keep yourself in check, to do the things you should do and to not do the things you shouldn't do? And over the years, I've talked to people who are masters at so many different things, great writers, politicians, military leaders, athletes, people who have had to practice this in the real world. I'm Ryan Holiday. I'm the author of a number of books about stoke philosophy. I've spoken to the NBA, in the NFL, sitting senators, special forces leaders. But in today's episode, we're going to talk to some experts about discipline and how this discipline helped them achieve their destiny.

4:54Whatever it is that they do, we're going to talk about the power of self-control. And I think you're going to like it.

5:02I always tell people, they're like, I want to be an actor and I want to do this. The only reason I am where I am in my career or that I have one is because I always made a promise to my young self. I said, if I'm 80 years old or jobless, at least I will have made my 12-year-old self proud. Sure. You know, because this is what I knew. I just had this knowing I had to do. I can't promise you that it will happen when you want it to or how you want it to. But if you love it. Yeah. You know, with everything that you are and you do it over and over and over again, it will happen for you. If you study, if you train, if you love it.

5:36And the irony in it is that the love and the joy is in the process of doing it. Yes. That's the most important thing is once you actually fall in love with what you're doing, the outcomes just happen. Because you do realize the mental game is the game. Tom Bray. It's easy to reference Tom because most people have seen his tryout video. And they've seen that he wasn't jumping higher, lifting more or running faster than anyone. That draft photo of him in 2000, he just looks like basically a regular guy. Yes, but you couldn't measure this or this. Sure. That's what you can't measure. Sure. Because his mental game was superior to everyone else's.

6:22Right. This guy, we'd have to tell him to go home because everybody else, you're begging him to watch film. And he's like, he's living in the film room. Yeah. Just trying to study and figure out how to approach the game. But his ability to see what the average person can't see. Again, the mental game is the game. Difficult things are good for you, and they're good for your mind. That's what people don't understand and don't pursue them. In America, unfortunately, there's this sort of intellectual elitism. There's this mindset that some very smart people have. Because they're very good at certain intellectual pursuits and they look down upon pursuits that are physical in nature because of this sort of prejudice.

7:13They have this idea. And I think it's also like a fear of encountering something that you're not good at or something that's going to humiliate you and something that's going to make you feel bad. It's like they maybe came from gym class, maybe came from being forced to participate in sports when they were younger and they didn't enjoy it. So they have this thing in their head that there's no value there. That's when your mind has to tell your body who the fuck's in charge. Yeah. But that's what it is. It's like you have to be able to endure. You have to be able to tell your body that this is what we do.

7:46And the more you do it, the easier it is, man. I made a video about it today when I was doing the cold plunge. Because it's so much easier than it used to be, but it's still hard. but it's just easy because I'm accustomed to the grind of it because I do it every day. So I just get in there or almost every day. There's something to that that's so valuable that doesn't get emphasized enough in our modern day conversations. And it doesn't get emphasized in media. It doesn't get talked about. You have to search for that. You have to search for this idea that struggle is difficult or, you know, like the title of your book, The Obstacle is the way.

8:26Like getting through things is how you build a stronger foundation. It's how you develop character. It's how the mind understands how to manage difficult situations. The proper idea to me is sort of a lot of what I meditate about and is in Buddhism, where you don't try to repress your emotions because first of all, you can't. We are emotional animals. And if ever you have tried to repress your emotions, particularly in the state of meditation, you see you have zero control over them, right? They're popping up. You know, it's the way we're wired. So the proper stance is I'm not going to repress emotions, but I'm going to understand them.

9:06I'm going to see them as they occur with a degree of distance. I'm going to see that I'm angry in this moment. I like to imagine it as if I'm six inches away from myself. I don't know why that metaphor come up. Only six inches? That doesn't seem that far. Well, it's out this side. It's like here. However, that's like a more like a foot, I guess. Right. And I'm looking at what I'm thinking or feeling from that distance, almost from the outside. And I'm still feeling it, but I'm seeing it as if it's from, as if I'm another person. I know this is a strange concept, but you can observe your own emotions while you're feeling them.

9:41And then you, they don't have power over you. Then you can say, okay I'm angry why am I angry so number one I recognize the emotion number two why am I angry is it stemmed from something weeks ago months ago or earlier today and then what do I do with my anger sometimes you want to use your anger you want to channel your anger so when you're in sports if you don't have that kind of drive and that anger when you're in a bet you know when you're down by 12 points it's like an extra gear yeah you can pull yeah there's a little bit of anger and even, I don't know, hatred or something, you just despise the enemy.

10:18You're going to crush them, right? You use that emotion. But as Phil Jackson said, if that emotion controls you throughout 48 minutes of a game, you're useless. You drain yourself. You can't control it. You also make mistakes. You make mistakes. So you need to be focused, but you also need to be able to use those emotions. That's where I use that metaphor of the rider and the horse, which I've repeated many, many times. Maybe that's another medallion that we could... Yeah. can manufacture. No, no, that's a great idea. You reach a point where you're, you know, you're, you're being funneled into a bucket of all the best players.

10:52Everybody that I was playing with were the same me, just in a different state, in a different section of the country. So there's got to be some sort of separation of what's going to keep you there and what's going to allow you to, to keep staying, you know, at the top. And I think it, it ultimately starts with passion. I mean, that, that for me is a non-negotiable. If you don't have any passion and love for what you do, it's going to be just treated as a job. It's going to be treated as, you know, this monotonous thing that you just go through life. But I mean, I loved playing that round ball was, was my first love, you know, and it was never about the money.

11:34It was never about the fame, the glory, nothing. It was purely because of the beautiful game. But when you step in between those lines, and I always stepped in between those lines, it was like everything else around me just paused. You know, it was just, it was like time stood still and I'm just playing this game. And yeah, it was pretty amazing. I always had other things, you know, language, guitar and music came a little later. I had given up. I gave up on it in my mid-20s, early 20s. That's why I, you know, went back to it. But like, I always wanted to do some things to take my mind off of basketball.

12:12Sure. Right? It's a lot of flights, a lot of bus rides. So, you know, you need some hobbies. I didn't think of it this way. But I had a friend that told me, you know, hobbies lead to greatness. And I always thought that fascinating and just that made me look back on things. and I did these things just to kind of get my mind off of the game. Sure. Because, you know, I was all in the basketball. That is all I did, but I also had other interests. And one of the things that I found was like, so for instance, during the playoffs, I would cook. The day before a game, I would cook dinner because you have to concentrate on the meal or it's going to suck.

12:51Right. You know, so I'm looking at the time. I'm checking the meat. I'm making sure I don't burn, boil the water over. It's a thing that I have to focus on. Sure. You know, because if I don't, my brain is going to start going and then we're going to start thinking about tomorrow and I'm going to be back in that rabbit hole. Right. Which is fine. Sure. You don't want to be there all the time. And one of the things I found is that once I start relaxing in my cooking or in me playing the guitar or in me studying for something in language, I see some weird connection to where I think about basketball.

13:27But it'd be like, oh, OK, I could put that to the side. It's like it was this crazy thing of no, you know, no, no judgment. Wow. I never thought of that before. This is the move I'm going to do tomorrow. I got it. Right. Yeah. Sometimes when you're thinking about something else, you create room for your brain sort of subconsciously solve some problem that we talked about willful will. You know, if you're, I got to solve this, I got to solve this, I got to solve, you're not going to make any progress. Yeah, yeah. And I think I read something somewhere like Einstein played the violin. If he ran into a problem, he just played violin for days, weeks, hours, whatever it took.

14:05So I always thought I thought that pretty fascinating. And that's kind of what I started using my hobbies for. Because the grind will grind you down if you don't have anything to refresh. All the way down. You can stay in it. You know, I was working with this with a video game team in the Overwatch League. and it's these Korean kids, you know, living in LA, competing, and they weren't doing too good. They're supposed to be the best team in the world and they weren't doing too good. And their thing is to be like, okay, 18 hours a day. Playing video games. Playing video games. Like, hey guys, you know what?

14:41Sometimes, yo, go to the park. Sometimes you just stink. I've been there plenty of times. Sometimes you just need to go in there and be like, Yeah, get out of here. Go for a walk. Go eat a delicious meal. Go do something else. Get out of here. You know, there is, you know, a lot of something to take from from just taking time off there. That is, you know, you do need time to repair your brain and your body to to be able to compete at maximum level. when i wrote the daily stoic eight years ago i had this crazy idea that i would just keep it going the book was 366 meditations but i'd write one more every single day and i'd give it away for free as an email i thought maybe a few people would sign up couldn't have even comprehended a future in which three quarters of a million people would get this email every single day and would for almost a decade if you want to get the email if you want to be part of a community that It is the largest group of Stoics ever assembled in human history.

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