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The Daily Stoic
What A Wonderful Thing to Measure | Stoic Strategies for Becoming More Resilient
00:14:54
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Welcome to the daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues courage, discipline, justice and wisdom into the real world. What a wonderful thing to measure. What makes for a successful life? How do we know whether we're doing it right? Whether we're winning, whether we're achieving? For someone like Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in the world, there were countless metrics he could have chosen. Did he expand the empire? Did he produce a great work of literature? Pass on his genes? Or more simply or more basely, did he enjoy himself? Did he experience pleasure? We know he didn't care much for any of these things, and there's an interesting passage late in book five that gives us a sense of how he measured his life. Consider all that you've gone through, all that you've survived, he writes, and that the story of your life is done, your assignment complete. What matters? He asks. What should he be proud of? It's not pleasure or achievement, that's for sure, because he specifically congratulates himself for temptations that he resisted and honors that he turned down. Instead, he puts forward a different metric. How many unkind people have you been kind to? What a wonderful thing to measure. Life is full of jerks. It's full of people who put achievement and pleasure above everything else. Not only do we have to not do that, but we should pride ourselves on our patience and tolerance. We should pride ourselves on our ability to put up with these people. To be able to be nice to people who are not nice. To be able to turn the other cheek and not be made bitter or cynical. The world has enough of those folks, has enough unkindness. Let's not add to it.
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What stoicism is, is a formula for enduring the blows of fortune, the whims of life. My name is Ryan Holiday. I've written a dozen books now about ancient philosophy, how we apply ancient wisdom to modern life. And I've been lucky enough to talk about it all over the world. Stoicism has been there for me in business. Failure and grief, facing looming deadlines, natural disasters and pandemics. And so in today's video, I want to give you a bunch of strategies for becoming more resilient, for becoming better, and preparing for the difficulties of life. There have been people who have talked about how to be resilient. And then there is Epictetus, the acquired one. As his name translates from Greek. Epictetus was born the son of a slave woman and spent the first 30 years of his life in chains. As a young boy, he was purchased by a man so violent and depraved that at one point he twisted Epictetus leg with all his might for reasons unknown. All we know from Epictetus is that he warned his master repeatedly, you're going to break my leg. You're going to break my leg. You're going to break my leg. And finally, when it snapped, he looked at his master in the face and said, I told you that would happen. From this incident, Epictetus leg was shattered, and he walked with a limp the rest of his life. And yet, not long after, something good happened. He began to attend the lectures of a Stoic philosopher named Musonius Rufus. And when Epictetus was freed from slavery in his 30s, he decided to become a philosophy teacher. His lectures immediately gained a large following the poor, the affluent, the powerful, and even the future. Emperor Hadrian, we're told, passed through Epictetus classroom. So what did he teach them? Why were people from all over the empire gathering at the feet of a one time slave? It was because he could teach them what we all how to be resilient. It was this skill that Epictetus promised will ensure we we lead a mainly untroubled life. And Epictetus had mastered it, and he taught others how to do it too. How do you cultivate resilience? Or as Epictetus put it, discover the power of endurance? It starts with, he said, your chief task in life, which is to be able to identify and distinguish between what is up to us and what is not up to us, the things we control and the things we cannot. That's the crucial distinction that every person must make. That's the difference between people who are resilient and people who aren't. One thing you learn in endurance sports is that you always have further to go than you think is possible. Your body is telling you to quit, or your mind is telling you to quit, but actually your body is capable of more. And you have to override this. You have to push past it. And so for me, the endurance sports and philosophy have helped me, even as a rider, because whenever I feel like quitting, whenever I feel like it's not working, whenever I feel like it's impossible, whenever I feel like it can't possibly go on any longer, I go. I know this feeling. I've dealt with this before. Epictetus talks about putting every impression up to the test. He talks about how a money changer knows what a counterfeit coin feels like. It sounds like. And when you do endurance sports, you get to that place where you know what weakness sounds like and feels like and what it's telling you to do, and how you don't have to listen to that because of your practice. You know that most of those limitations, most of that desire to quit or stop or slow down, is a lie. And you push past it, you push through it, and this gets you to where you want to go. All growth is on the other side of resistance. Whether it's writing, whether it's in a relationship, whether it's in your work, whether it's in a creative pursuit, whether it's a business, all growth is on the other side of that resistance. And so having an endurance sport practice something that you're trying to get good at, whether it's CrossFit or weightlifting or running or rock Climbing something where you're constantly testing those reservations. And the whole practice is learning when to push through and when not to push through. I can't recommend it highly enough. I know that getting outside and doing that stuff, it might not seem like what the Stoics were doing, what philosophers were doing, but in fact, it was what they were doing. You know, Marcus Aurelius hunted, He rode horses. Horses, he wrestled. There was a Stoic Chrysippus and Cleanthes, who were boxers and distance runners. The Stoics were athletes. And this practice is deeply important into getting to that philosophical place of resilience and fortitude. There's a quote from Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world. He's saying it's very important to always live your life by an inner scorecard, not an outer scorecard. What he means by this is not just there are going to be moments in your life where you do everything right and it doesn't work out right. So if all you care about is what the scoreboard says or the win loss column, you're going to chalk that up as a loss, even though you're learning the wrong lesson there, right? Because you actually did all the things that you were supposed to do. It just didn't work out in your favor. But this is actually the more insidious part. This is where ego leads us astray. I think oftentimes you will do everything wrong or you will not do things as well as you could, and you'll still get the outcome that you were expecting. And this is where we learn a bad lesson. We learn that it's okay to be lazy, it's okay to cut corners, it's okay to get lucky.
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Right?
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And so I think one of the most compelling examples of this story of someone not falling prey to that, not listening to the outer scoreboard is the New England patriots, right? In 2000, they draft a guy named Tom Brady. He's a sixth round pick. He's chosen 199, ninth in the draft. So arguably, this is the greatest draft pick in the history of football, maybe even the history of professional sports. Right? They were glad that it worked out, but that's not the lesson they took from this. In fact, what they zoomed in on is the fact that all of their intelligence failed, right? How did they let Tom Brady go all the way to the sixth round? They got lucky, right? They didn't think that he was worth drafting earlier. And in fact, because he was backing up another player, and then Drew Bledsoe, if Drew Bledsoe hadn't gotten hurt, we might not have ever known how good Tom Brady actually was. The story of the New England Patriots might have turned out very differently. So that even in this tremendous success, right in that picture there, even in that tremendous success, what the Patriots are honing in on is the failure inside the success, and that's the hunger to get better. Right. There's a. I don't know if you ever read the children's story the Little Prince. It's a wonderful story that we tell children. There's a quote in it, and I think it's very important. He's saying, vain men never hear anything but praise. Instead, they're hearing amidst all the praise they're hearing and looking at what they could have done better. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, it's not unfortunate that this happened to me. He says it's fortunate, fortunate that this happened to me. It's better that it happened to me, he says, than somebody else, because not everyone would be able to deal with it the way that I'm able to deal with it. And that's what you want to remind yourself as you're going through stuff. You go, better me than somebody else. I know how to get through stuff like this. I'm tough enough to get through stuff like this. I'm strong enough to get through stuff like this. I'm going to get through it. I'm going to turn it into something. And not everyone would be strong enough, smart enough, resilient enough, creative enough to do that. And that's why it's not unfortunate that whatever this is happened to you. It's fortunate that this happened to you. And that's what this idea of Amor Fatih is about. You love it because it happened to you. And you know what you're going to be able to make of it. Who are you learning from? Right. Not just your teachers, but what sort of active path of studying and education are you currently on? What questions are you asking? Who are you asking those questions to? Specifically, I'd say, what books are you reading? I love this quote from General Mattis. He says, if you haven't read hundreds of books, you're functionally illiterate. And he says this in Call Sign Chaos, which is a wonderful book, but he's saying human beings have been fighting on this planet and writing about it for a minimum of 5,000 years. Right. And he says it's unconscionable, even criminal, for leaders to be learning by trial and error what has already been learned by other people. He Says you're learning by trial and error. You're filling up body bags when you could just be reading books, right? And so if you haven't read hundreds of books, you're functionally literate. There have been midshipmen who have written books about their experiences. Whatever job you want in the armed forces, people have written about that. Smart people have written about it. People who it up have written about it, right? You can learn from all different types of people. You want to learn from, from cautionary tales, you want to learn from inspirations, you want to read how to books, you want to read history books. You want to drink deeply from this hard won store of knowledge. Tolstoy says, I cannot understand people who can live without communicating with the wisest people who ever lived on earth. This is what books provide us. But Twain, as always, says it better. Those who do not read have no advantage over those who cannot read. If you are not reading, you are essentially illiterate, right? It doesn't matter that you can, it matters are you doing it? The biggest enemy that everyone in this room faces, right? Our most dangerous opponent for this team. To your career. To each and every leader in the world. Look, it's not someone you line up against. It's not the risk of injury. It's not the critics in the media. It's not a coach or a GM or even another player. It's you, right? When you look at the great empires of history, when you look at the colossal failures, businesses that went from billions of dollars to zero, when you look at people who have ruined their careers, ruined their life, right? It's not some outside force that came and took what they had from them. It's they destroyed themselves. And this goes back to all Greek poetry and plays, right? That hubris, right, that tears us down, that makes us overreach, that makes us take our eye off the ball. That's what ego is, right? Our ego is the primary enemy. And look, this goes back a long time. It's in the Bible, right? Pride goeth before the fall. And then we even have this. In ancient Greek poetry, the first thing which the gods bestow on those they want to destroy is pride. Pride is what tears us down when we think we're better than other people, we think we're invincible. We think the rules don't apply to us. This is when we start to get in trouble. This is when we make mistakes. And so it's easy to see the ego in other people, right? We know Steve Jobs, ego got him fired from Apple the first time Kanye West's ego's always getting him into trouble. Six, nine. You know he's going to spend the rest of his life in prison. Kind of idiot joins a gang after you become a successful rapper. But that's what ego is, right? That's trying to impress people that don't actually matter. This is the guy that created Fyre Fest, right? Bad idea. You can't just throw a concert on an island if you've never thrown a concert before in your life and you've not rented an island to have a concert on. But this is what ego does. It gets us in trouble. This is the founder of Theranos, billionaire net worth now of zero, right? Because she liked the marketing and the hype of what she was doing. But another word for faking it till you make it is fraud. And she's going to spend time in jail as well. So it's easy to think about other people's ego, and we can spot that pretty easy. And we know when people's ego is holding them back. But where does your ego hold you back? That's what I want you to think about, right? What is ego preventing you from learning or doing? Where are you making decisions out of ego? And how is that causing problems for you? Every day I send out an email inspired by the best stoic wisdom. Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, all designed to help you live a better life. That's what I'm trying to do. The email takes five minutes to read. I'd love to have you check it out. Totally free, unsubscribe whenever you want, but I think you'll like it. Sign up@dailystoic.com email. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.
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