The Daily Stoic - 12 Lessons From 12 Months Owning A Bookstore

Episode Date: May 29, 2022

It's going to take longer than you thought, but it will be worth it in the end.By the first week of March 2020 the world was entrenched in a pandemic. What began with such excitement for Ryan Holiday and his wife Samantha ended up taking much longer and costing way more than they had expected. In this video Ryan breaks down the 12 most important lessons that he's taken away from the first year being in business.Sign up for Ryan Holiday's Reading List Newsletter: https://ryanholiday.net/reading-list/Get the Ernest Hemingway "First Draft" Tee at the Painted PorchCome visit The Painted Porch on Main Street in Bastrop, TX or shop online at https://www.thepaintedporch.com/Sunday can help you grow a beautiful lawn without the guesswork OR nasty chemicals. F​​ull-season plans start at just $129, and you can get 20% off at checkout when you visit GETSUNDAY.COM/STOIC.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stood Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wondering's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic.

Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time.

Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast.

As you know, stoicism is a philosophy you try to actually apply. You try to actually use. Whatever it is that you're doing. Of course, I write about stoicism, but I have to use it in my life as I write about stoicism, right? Whether I'm putting out a book or working on a book or you know, dealing with the heat in your in Texas, I try to think about how to use stoicism the way that the stookes used it, which was on big problems and little problems all the same. And as you know, the big sort of project of the last couple years of my life is not just this 4-Virgeous series I'm working on, but this bookstore I opened here in Baster, Texas, in the middle of the pandemic. When it felt like the world was falling to pieces. And over the last year or so of it being open, I learned a lot about business. I learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot about my wife. And I of course learned a lot about applying stoicism to problems big and

small. In today's episode, I want to give you a bunch of lessons that I learned in that process, where you, you know, you write and you study and you think about So, and then you experience something and the wisdom of it that How it works comes to you come to understand it in a different way Of course, that's what Marx really this means when he says that we never step in the same river twice and I came back to a lot of these stoic teachings and understood them from a new perspective, a new angle in so many ways. And of course, Stoicism all traces its roots back to a bookstore where Xeno is introduced to Stoicism and Philosophy at a bookstore after washing up in Athens.

It's fascinating little story, which we did in today. But in today's episode, I wanted to give you some important lessons that I've learned from the Stoics, from life running this little bookstore here in Baster, Texas, where I am recording right now. And you are welcome to come anytime. We'd love to see you. We've got a great philosophy section. And it's called the Painted Ports because that's where Xeno founded Stoicism after that experience in the bookstore.

But without further ado, here are 12 lessons from 12 months owning a bookstore, my bookstore, the painted porch, which wouldn't be here without the doasters, and wouldn't be here without the many of you listeners who've come out and supported it, enjoy. It always takes longer than you think it's gonna take. That's Hofstetter's Law.

We had this idea to open the bookstore in the fall of 2019. We got really serious about it in the late winter, early spring of 2020. And we thought maybe we'd be ready by the summer of 2020. And then there was a pandemic and that pushed us a full year. Then it took many, many months to get up and running. And then every time we thought the pandemic was was over and things were about to go back to normal, you know, it never went back to normal. And the idea is, if you think starting a business, doing anything

is going to be easy, that it's going to be straightforward, that it's going to be clean, like you're fooling yourself, it always takes longer than you think it's going to take. One of the things you learn doing a business like this, doing anything, is that you have to be really patient. It's gonna take so much longer than you think it's gonna take. And if you're rushed, if you expect it, now if you can't pass the marshmallow test

of delaying gratification and deferring things into the future, you're just gonna get crushed. There's this great Hemingway line. We actually have a shirt of it I love and I have a print of it on my wall. It's one of my favorite all-time quotes. Hemingway said, the first draft of everything is shit.

I'd never done something like this. I love how it is now, but this wasn't how it was a weekend, two weeks in, six months in, a year in. It wasn't how it was a Weekend two weeks in six months in a year and it wasn't how it was when we open It's been a continual process of improvement and growth and making changes So you have to be able you have to be comfortable starting small and the problem is when you have really high standards when you expect a lot of yourself It's hard to get comfortable with something that's kind of crappy or mediocre or not all the way there So when when you say the first draft of everything that shit and I love the print and I love the shirt

and you can check it out, we sell them here at the store, of course. Don't demand perfection of yourself early on. Give yourself the permission to experiment, to try. It's not perfect the first go around. No business is everything it could or should be on opening day, you have to be comfortable getting better as you go. So I don't agree when people say money is the root of all evil, but money can be a distraction. It's not usually the best way to measure success. So like when we did this bookstore, the painted porch, right? It was obviously not to make lots of money because there are so many better, easier,

cheaper ways to make money in this life. So you have to understand how you're gonna measure the success of what you do and almost always money is not that thing. If this makes no money, if it loses money, if it loses obscene amounts of money, it goes out of business, We can't continue to exist. Profit is fuel. It's what makes the car go. But it's really important that you think about how you're going to measure what you're doing.

We wanted to think about impact. We wanted to think about whether it improves our lives, whether we have fun doing it, whether we help bring books into the world, whether we make this community better, you have to be careful that money doesn't creep in and corrupt or distract you from what you're trying to do or or how you should be trying to measure success. There's never going to be a shortage of reasons why you can't do something, why it's too expensive, why it's too hard.

So one of the things I did while I was kicking this around is I looked up like how expensive is it to start a bookstore. It was like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, like way more expensive than I could possibly afford. But then I wanted to question whether that number was real. So what I did was I went and I looked at how expensive it was to start like an e-commerce business like what daily still it is and they said it was hundreds of thousands of dollars more than I'd spent to start that business And that was really helpful. It's like oh these people don't really know what they're talking about or if there's a

Cheaper a different way to do it. You don't have to do it the way that everyone else doesn't so when you get criticism When you get information when you get facts, and of course you have to look for those things But you also have to take them with a grain of salt You have to really look at them. You have to put them up to the test as the stoic say to find out which ones are real Which ones are counterfeit which ones you can trust and which ones you realize are not are not fully accurate So that was really really important. It was questioning some of assumptions, the facts on the ground, and getting to the real core of how it wasn't. It turned out it was still very expensive to start, but it wasn't as expensive as those people said it was, and it actually was doable for us to do it.

When I was thinking about opening my bookstore, I asked him, Ferris, I said, you know, is this something I should do? Am I crazy? Am I going to lose all my money? It's going to blow up my life. I really want to do it, but I'm not sure. And he said, think about it as an experiment. He said, how are you going to know if it's something you want to do if you haven't tried doing it? And so the decision to see it as an experiment, not as a permanent forever life choice, was

so freeing because it allowed me to go into it knowing, okay, for the next two years, this is something I'm committed to, but I can change my mind after that. And so this idea of seeing everything as an experiment is totally life-changing, and it's what made doing this bookstore possible. People talk about like trusting their gut or whatever, but that's something you have to

earn. I talk about this in Ego is the enemy. Like there's a difference between confidence and ego. Ego things like whatever I want to do, of course, I'm going to be successful. I'm great. Confidence is something you earn. Something you earn over time. It's something you earn by having an idea, bringing it into reality, learning what you're

capable of, learning what's possible, learning what you're capable of, learning what's possible, learning why you do deserve to trust yourself. On the other side of this, having done this scary thing, having done the thing that a lot of people said it wasn't a good idea, you're like, oh, I can do this, I'm capable of this. Senaq says like, I pity the person who's never gone

through adversity, who's never done anything difficult, so don't know what they're capable of. The greatest wealth that comes out of this experience is that trust and that confidence and that sense of what I'm capable of. At my ranch here in Texas, we've got about 40 or so acres, which I don't obviously manage the way one would manage a lawn. But then there's a little yard around the house. And because of all the different grasses, because the

animal sometimes try to get in there. And then because of the immensity of the rest of the yard, we have it is not the easiest yard to take care of. And that's why we've been customers of Sunday well before they sponsored the podcast. Traditional lawn care lays down like 90 million pounds of pesticides each year. Sunday is different, and they're on a mission to change how people care for the yards. Sunday's different.

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when you visit getsunday.com slash doughock. That's 20% off your custom plant at getsunday.com slash doughock. When I first started my reading list newsletter, this would have been 2008, 2009, the idea was that I wanted to celebrate other people's works, because I didn't have any of my own books. I thought maybe that by celebrating other people's works, by saying this is a book that will change your life,

this is an amazing book, I could build a relationship with people that later years in the future, if I ever did any of my own books, they would know that I have good taste or judgment, that I could buy myself from them by putting out value into the world, eventually earn the trust or the respect that when I came out with one of my own books, they would at least know that I know what a good book is.

To me, the bookstore is an extension of the idea of celebrating other people's work. And when you do that, when you create value for people, when you celebrate other people's work, when you're generally a positive force in your industry, in your space, you develop a reputation, you want to support you, people want to help you. And so now when I say,

hey, buy this book from the Pan and Porch, people have been buying books that I've been recommending for 10 years, they trust me. The world is not zero some, the more you help others, the more you help yourself. This is a no- I wrote to myself when we were opening the bookstore in the middle of the pandemic. I said, 2020 is a test. Will it make you a better person or a worse person? If it makes you worse,

if it stresses you out, if it tears your relationship apart, if it makes you better or frustrated with people, then it doesn you bitter or frustrated with people, then it doesn't matter how successful it is, it's not successful. I just wanted to think about as I was going through it, like what does success look like? When we just decided that success was gonna be becoming more community-minded,

becoming more responsible, becoming better organized, having more fun, like making a positive contribution. We didn't want to contribute to the problem we wanted to contribute to the solution. That's community, that's public health, that's all that stuff. If you succeed, but it comes at the cost of happiness or other important things in life, it's not success. So that was just something I thought about. That was the test that I wanted to remind myself of over and over again. Will this make you a better person or a worse person? If it makes you a worse person, what's the point?

It would be wonderful, of course, if marketing didn't have to exist, if things could be bare-boned, if presentation didn't matter. That's not how life works. Never has, and it never will be. And that was something we thought a lot about at the Painted Fortune.

I think one of the best decisions we made, and it's a lesson for me, we put up this book now. This is like 2,000 books, it's 20 feet tall, it weighs 2,000 pounds, it's 4,000 nails, and 40 gallons of glue. Like it was this whole creation. It's like an art piece. But it's the number one thing that people come into the store

and take pictures of. People want experiences, right? Like if they just wanted price, if they just wanted ease, they'd buy online. It was not cheap to do. I'll tell you, it was hard. It took forever. We had to solve all sorts of logistical problems

to make it work. But it's also probably one of the single best marketing and business decisions we made in the whole store do interesting stuff Do stuff that commands attention how you make it stand out how you draw attention like a magnet it cannot be underestimated There's a great line from Peter Tio. He says competition is for losers The point being when you're doing something There's a great line from Peter Tio, he says competition is for losers. The point being when you're doing something, you know, you can kind of see how everyone else is doing it, you can see how it's supposed to be done, and there's a safety and a security in that, because it's a well-trod path.

But that's not really where success comes from. When you want to succeed, it's something you have to find a way to differentiate yourself. You have to find a way to do it in a way that no one else is doing it. The way that only you can do it. The big decision on the bookstore, it's a lesson that I've learned over and over again, but it was really codified here, was like, I didn't want to be like every other bookstore.

Most bookstores have thousands and thousands of books, like between 10 and 15,000 books. But what we decided here was we'd have like a couple hundred books, only my absolute favorite books. The books that I put in my reading list email, which I've sent out for like a decade now, it would only be those books. I think the lesson over and over again

is don't compete with other people, do your own thing. Right, you don't need to be first, you wanna be the only. You wanna be the only one doing it, you wanna have a unique proposition, you wanna have something the only you want to be the only one doing that you want to have a unique proposition You want to have something that only you could do and that's what makes you stand out. That's what makes you special A lot of people don't know that that stoicism was actually founded in a bookstore Zeno he's a successful merchant. He suffers a shipwreck. He loses everything and he washes up in Athens completely penniless. And it ends up in a bookstore and there in that bookstore he hears the bookseller reading the works of Socrates.

And it's there. She falls in love with philosophy. He falls in love with the idea of this sort of philosophical mentor that was Socrates. And it goes up to the bookseller and he says, hey, where can I find a man like that? And the bookseller says, well, look right there. And there was a guy, a philosopher walking by named Cratees. And this becomes Zeno's mentor. And shortly thereafter, Zeno founds his own philosophical school, which becomes Stoicism. Stoepokile in Athens is where he found Stoicism.

That's the name of my bookstore, the Painted Porch. He realized in that bookstore, hearing the works of Socrates, that a bookstore was a place to talk to the dead. So many of the authors in this bookstore are dead. Like, look, here's the Indian, right? There's a 2,000 year old book. Here's Epic Data, it's a 2,000 year old book. Here's the Odyssey. We don't even know how old this is, right? But you can talk to those authors as if they're still a lot. And I think the real lesson from opening a bookstore, the power of books to me,

remains that idea that Xeno got 2,500 years ago, the idea that through conversations with the dead, talking to the wisest people who ever lived who are no longer with us, but survive to us in the form of books. That is the secret to wisdom. That's the wonderful thing. And over and over again, even when things were really hard, I've just turned to books, which I loved. I continue to have those conversations with the dead. To me, that's what makes bookstores so powerful. You may notice I'm not at the bookstore for this one and that's because the bookstore is closed. All our employees are out sick.

We're not able to be open. Is it going to be five days of being closed? Is it ten days of being closed? How much money is it going to cost? I don't know. I know that there wasn't anything we could have done to avoid this. We were immensely safe. We took every precaution.

We even, we were controversial at how many precautions and protections we put in place. My conscience is clear, but that doesn't change the fact that it affects the business, but this is life, right? In the obstacles way, I quote this Haitian proverb that I like, that behind mountains, there are more mountains. That's just how life is, you don't overcome one obstacle, you don't get through the first year of your business

and then you're magically done with obstacles. That's not how life works. Life is one obstacle after another. You have to keep going. And that's what we're gonna do. We're not judging the success of this business. Purely in dollars and cents, what matters to me is are the employees okay?

What matters is are we doing the right thing? Are we acting in accordance with our values? Are we doing what's right for the community? So we'll have to endure this, we'll have to eat this, and that's just life, that's just business. We'll take a day by day, we'll get through this, we won't be deterred by it, we'll continue to do the right thing, which is all a person

and a business and a stoic can do. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day, check it out at dailystoke.com slash email. Hey Prime Members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke early and add free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Celebrity feuds are high stakes.

You never know if you're just gonna end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wondery's new podcast, Dish and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds say about us?

The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support. It angered some fans. A lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Britney. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music

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