The Daily Stoic - Amor Fati: Love Everything That Happens | Read By Ryan Holiday

Episode Date: April 21, 2024

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I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankopan. And in our podcast Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we delve into the life of Alan Turing. Why are we talking about Alan Turing, Peter? Alan Turing is the father of computer science. And some of those questions we're thinking about today around artificial intelligence. Turing was so involved in setting and framing what some of those questions were.

But he's also interesting for lots of other reasons, Afro. He had such a fascinating life. He was unapologetically gay at a time when that was completely criminalised and stigmatised. And from his imagination, he created ideas that have formed a very physical, practical foundation for all of the technology on which our lives depend. And on top of that, he's responsible for being part of a team that saved millions,

maybe even tens of millions of lives because of his work during the Second World War using maths and computer science to code break. So join us on Legacy wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford. and we're the presenters of British Scandal. And in our latest series, Hitler's Angel, we tell the story of scandalous beauty Diana Mosley, British aristocrat, Mitford sister and fascist sympathiser. Like so many great British stories, it starts at a lavish garden party. Diana meets the dashing fascist Oswald Moseley. She's captivated by his politics but also by his very good looks.

It's not a classic rom-com story but when she falls in love with Moseley, she's on a collision course with her family, her friends and her whole country. There is some romance though. The couple tied the knot in a ceremony organised by a great, uncelebrated wedding planner, Adolf Hitler. There is some romance though. The couple tied the knot in a ceremony organised by a great, uncelebrated wedding planner, Adolf Hitler. So it's less Notting Hill, more Nuremberg. When Britain took on the Nazis, Diana had to choose between love or betrayal.

This is the story of Diana Mosley on her journey from glamorous socialite to political prisoner. Listen to British Scandal on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobook books that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast.

It seems insane to me. I was just so... When I write books, I basically... I write them in Google Docs first, and at some point, the draft all comes together in a Word doc because this is what they use in publishing and Quite frankly Google Docs gets too unwieldy and big and it starts to glitch up So at some point my books switch to Microsoft Word and I've been using it a long time. You want to know how long I've been using it

Well, I found here. This is a draft. This is a Toitw the obstacle is the way working draft end of day. This is a draft. This is a T-O-I-T-W. The obstacle is the way working draft end of day. This is the file name 404. That's April 4th, 2013. So almost 11 years ago now exactly I was working on this book. I may have been on that day writing this very chapter of the obstacle is the way. One of my favorite chapters in my first book on

Stoicism. It's about how we don't just accept what happens, we embrace it, we love it, we get better for it. You know the funny thing is I came up with that file name and it says end of day because I would save the draft every day. I would email it to myself. I wanted it in multiple places. This is in Dropbox and everything, because I was just afraid of losing everything, right? Losing what you'd spent so many months on. And I have lost things that I had worked quite a bit on.

And it's devastating at first, but you get back from it. I actually added now in the 10 year anniversary of the book, which will come out in the fall and just finishing it up right now. A chapter about that very thing happening to Hemingway. Hopefully it won't happen to you, but hopefully you will like this chapter. This is a chapter of the audiobook from the obstacle is the way a more fatty is I think in the essence of stoicism, it's a really

important idea in stoicism I Stoicism. It's a really important idea in Stoicism. I actually have here, and it's funny I have a little bowl on my desk. This is the Amor Fati Medallion that I made with Robert Greene. We sell it at store.dailystoic.com. I'll link to that. But anyways, here's the obstacles away.

If you haven't read the book, the audio book, ebook, grab that and grab signed copies in the Daily Stoic Store. And if you like this chapter, if you like the idea of Amor Fati, you can grab a coin of it at in the Daily Stoke store. And if you like this chapter, if you like the idea of a Morfati, you can grab a coin of it at store.dailystoke.com. Thanks to Penguin Random House Audio for letting me publish this. Thanks first and foremost to Tim Ferriss,

who encouraged me to do the audio book of this all these years ago and helped me publish it. Those rights reverted back to the publisher recently and he was a very cool dude about it. But in the meantime, I'm gonna bring that to you. I hope you're having a great Sunday and I hope you like this excerpt of my first book on Stoicism, which is now 11 years old.

["The Last Supper"] Love everything that happens. Amor fati. My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati. That one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it, but love it. Nietzsche At age 67, Thomas Edison returned home early one evening from another day at the laboratory. Shortly after dinner, a man came rushing into his house with urgent news. A fire had broken out at Edison's research and production campus a few miles away.

Fire engines from eight nearby towns rushed to the scene, but they could not contain the blaze. Fueled by the strange chemicals in the various buildings, green and yellow flames shot up six and seven stories, threatening to destroy the entire empire Edison had spent his life building. Edison calmly but quickly made his way to the fire, through the now hundreds of onlookers and devastated employees looking for his son.

Go get your mother and all her friends, he told his son with childlike excitement. They'll never see a fire like this again. What? Don't worry, Edison calmed him. It's all right, we've just got rid of a lot of rubbish. That's a pretty amazing reaction. But when you think about it, there really was no other response.

What should Edison have done? Wept? Got angry? Quit and gone home? What exactly would that have accomplished? You know the answer now, it's nothing. So he didn't waste time indulging himself. To do great things, we need to be able to endure tragedy and setbacks.

We've got to love what we do and all that it entails, good and bad. We have to learn to find joy in every single thing that happens. Because there was a little more than rubbish in Edison's buildings, years and years of priceless records, prototypes, and research were turned to ash. The buildings, which had been made of what was supposedly fireproof concrete, had been insured for only a fraction of their worth. Thinking that they were immune to such disasters, Edison and his investors were covered for about a third of the damage.

Still, Edison wasn't heartbroken, not as he could have and probably should have been. Instead, it invigorated him. As he told a reporter the next day, he wasn't too old to make a fresh start. I've been through a lot of things like this, he said. It prevents a man from being afflicted with ennui.

Within about three weeks, the factory was partially back up and running. Within a month, its men were working two shifts a day churning out new products that the world had never seen. Despite a loss of almost $1 million, more than $23 million in today's dollars. Edison would marshal enough energy to make nearly $10 million in revenue that year, $200-plus million today. He not only suffered a spectacular disaster, but he recovered and replied to it spectacularly. The next step after we discard our expectations and accept what happens to us, after understanding that certain things, particularly bad things, are outside our control, is this.

Loving whatever happens to us and facing it with unfailing cheerfulness. It is the act of turning what we must do into what we get to do. We put our energies and emotions and exertions where they will have real impact. This is that place. We will tell ourselves, this is what I've got to do or put up with. Well, I might as well be happy about it. Hello, I'm Emily, one of the hosts of Terribly Famous, the show that takes you inside the lives of our biggest celebrities. Some of them hit the big time overnight, some had to plug away for years, but in our latest series we're talking about a man who was

world famous before he was even born. A life of extreme privilege that was mapped out from the start, but left him struggling to find his true purpose. A man who, compared to his big brother, felt a bit, you know, spare. Yes, it's Prince Harry. You might think you know everything about him, but trust me, there's even more. We follow Harry and the obsessive, all-consuming relationship of his life, not with Meghan, but the British tabloid press. Hounded and harassed, Harry is taking on an institution almost every bit as powerful as

his own royal family. Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to podcasts, or listen early and ad-free on Wandery+, on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. Here's an image to consider. The great boxer Jack Johnson in his famous 15 round brawl with Jim Jefferies. Jefferies, the great white hope, called out of retirement like some deranged Cincinnati's to defeat the ascendant black champion and Johnson genuinely hated by his opponent in the crowd still enjoying every

minute of it. Smiling, joking, playing the whole fight. Why not? There's no value in any other reaction. Should he hate them for hating him? Bitterness was their burden and Johnson refused to pick it up. Not that he simply took the abuse. Instead, Johnson designed his fight plan around it.

At every nasty remark from Jeffery's corner, he'd give his opponent another lacing. At every low trick or rush from Jeffery's, Johnson would quip and beat it back, but never lose his cool. And when one well-placed blow opened a cut on Johnson's lip, he kept smiling. A gory, bloody, but nevertheless cheerful smile. Every round he got happier, friendlier, as his opponent grew enraged, tired, eventually losing the will to fight. In your worst moments, picture Johnson, always calm, always in control, genuinely loving the opportunity to prove himself, to perform for

people, whether they wanted him to succeed or not. Each remark bringing the response it deserved and no more, letting the opponent dig his own grave. Until the fight ended with Jefferies on the floor and every doubt about Johnson silenced. As Jack London, the famous novelist, reported from the ringside seats, No one understands him, this man who smiles. Well, the story of the fight is the story of a smile.

If ever a man won by nothing more fatiguing than a smile, Johnson won today. That man is us, or rather it can be us, if we strive to become like him. For we're in our own fight with our own obstacles, and we can wear them down with our relentless smile, frustrating the people or impediments attempting to frustrate us. We can be Edison, our factory on fire, not bemoaning our fate, but enjoying the spectacular scene, and then starting the recovery effort the very next day, roaring back soon enough. Your obstacle may not be so serious or violent, but they are nevertheless significant and outside your control.

They warrant only one response, a smile. As the Stoics commanded themselves, cheerfulness in all situations, especially the bad ones. Who knows where Edison and Johnson learned this epigram, but they clearly did. Learning not to kick and scream about matters we can't control is one thing. Indifference and acceptance are certainly better than disappointment or rage. Very few understand or practice that art, but it is only a first step. Better than all of that is love for all that happens to us, for every situation. The goal is not, I'm okay with this, not, I think I feel good about this.

But I feel great about it. Because if it happened then it was meant to happen and I am glad that it did when it did. I am meant to make the best of it. And proceed to do exactly that. We don't get to choose what happens to us, but we can always choose how we feel about it. And why on earth would you choose to feel anything but good? We can choose to render a good account of ourselves. If the event must occur, a more fatty, a love of fate, is the response.

Don't waste a second looking back at your expectations. Face forward and face it with a smug little grin. Don't waste a second looking back at your expectations, face forward, and face it with a smug little grin. It's important to look at Johnson and Edison because they weren't passive. They didn't simply roll over and tolerate adversity. They accepted what happened to them. They liked it. It's a little unnatural, I know,

to feel gratitude for things we never wanted to happen in the first place. But we know at this point the opportunities and benefits that lay within adversities. We know that in overcoming them, we emerge stronger, sharper, empowered. There's little reason to delay these feelings, to begrudgingly acknowledge later that it was for the best when we could have felt that in advance, because it was inevitable. You love it because it's all fuel, and you don't just want fuel, you need it. You can't go anywhere without it. No one or no thing can, so you're grateful for it. That is not to say that the good will always outweigh the bad, or that it comes free and without cost.

But there is always some good, even if only barely perceptible at first, contained within the bad. And we can find it and be cheerful because of it. Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic Store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend. The obstacles away, you go as the enemy, stillness is the key.

The leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoic, we have them all in the Daily Stoic Store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com. Hey Prime members, you can listen to the daily stoic early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. You know, if I would have applied myself, I could have gone to the NBA. You think so? Yeah, I think so. But it's just like, it's been done.

You know, I didn't want to, I was like, I don't want to be a follower. Hi, I'm Jason Concepcion. And I'm Shea Serrano. And we are back. We have a new podcast from Wondery. It's called Six Trophies. Woo! And this is the fucking best.

Each week, Shea Serrano and I are combing through all the NBA storylines, finding the best, most interesting, most compelling stories, and then handing out six pop culture themed trophies for six basketball related activities. Trophies like the Dominic Toretto, I Live My Life a Quarter mile at a time trophy, which is given to someone who made a short term decision

with no regard for future consequence. Or the Christopher Nolan Tenet trophy, which is given to someone who did something that we didn't understand. Catalina wine mixer trophy. Ooh, the Lauryn Hill, you might win some, but you just lost one trophy. And what's more, the NBA playoffs are here,

so you want to make six trophies your go-to companion podcast through all the craziness. Follow Six Trophies on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts, listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.