The Daily Stoic - Are You Dug In? | 7 Perspective Shifting Stoic Tips From Actors, Writers, and Politicians

Episode Date: December 26, 2023

What about you? Are you ready for the inevitable, unending challenges that lay ahead? Just think about what 2024 could bring—we’re facing global conflicts, a make-or-break presidential election, untamed inflation, climate change…plus all the regular stuff! How dug in are you? How tough is your inner citadel? How is your battle stance? How sharp are your weapons? How prepared is your mind?Are you a wrestler? You have to be.For the last five years, thousands of Stoics from across the globe have joined us in the New Year New You Challenge—a set of 21 actionable challenges, presented one per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. These aren’t pie-in-the-sky, theoretical discussions but clear, immediate exercises and methods you can begin right now to spark the reinvention you’ve been trying for. We’ll tell you what to do, how to do it, and why it works.And in today's Daily Stoic video excerpt, Ryan quotes Seneca, “There is the need for someone against which our characters can measure themselves. Without a ruler, you won’t make the crooked straight.” We need mentors, teachers, and coaches to make us better. The key to peak performance is to always remain a student. Always seek opportunities to challenge yourself and your team. Always. Be. Learning. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check 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.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On 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. Are you dug in? Considering what happened to him during his reign, it was a pretty good strategy. Mark's really experienced plagues and war and floods and tragedies.

He buried his own children. He was betrayed in a coup attempt. Rome's treasury was depleted. That was just the extreme events. There was also the day-to-day life, the week-to-week challenges that life brings every person. Trouble sleeping, bad weather, feeling sick, hurting your knee, traveled the ways of disagreement with your spouse, habits you can't quit. How did he do with all of this?

He says in meditations that he needed to face life like a wrestler, waiting, poised, and dug in for sudden assaults. Some say that Marcus was cynical or a little dark in his writings. No, what he was doing was preparing himself, stealing himself for the very real challenges he faced, and that he knew that he would face. And what about you? Are you ready for the inevitable unending challenges that lay ahead? Just think about what 2024 could bring, we're facing global conflicts, a make or break presidential election, untamed inflation, climate change, plus all the regular stuff. How dug in are you? How tough is your inter-sididil? How is your battle stance? How sharp are your weapons? How prepared is your

mind? Are you a wrestler? Because you have to be. And look, for the last five years, Stoics all over the world, thousands and thousands of them have joined us. The daily Stoic knew your new challenge. It's 21 actionable challenges. And they're called challenges because they're hard, not easy, presented one per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in ancient philosophy. And I'd love to have you join us, join me doing that together. It's almost a book's worth of content. There's live Q&As, there's a calendar, yeah, access to the Q&A, a bunch of awesome stuff. And I'd love for you to start your year

by sharpening your weapons and getting in the habit of seeking out challenges. Don't let this be another year that you let yourself slide by taking the easy path. That's not fair to you, it's not fair to the world. Let's do this together. You can sign up right now, sign up with me at dailystoic.com slash challenge.

And if you're thinking about joining daily stic life, well, you can do that now and get the daily stoic, new year, new year challenge totally for free. You can do that at dailystoiclife.com. But I hope to see you in the daily stoic, new year, new year challenge at dailystoic.com slash challenge. I told this story before, but the first Airbnb I stayed in was 15 years ago. I was looking for places to live when I wanted to be a writer and we stayed at this house I think outside Phoenix. And then when I bought my first house here in Austin, I would rent it out when South

by Southwest or F-1 or all these events. My wife and I would go out of town and we'd I would rent it out when, or South by Southwest, or F-1 or all these events. My wife and I would go out of town and we'd rent it and it helped pay for the mortgage and it supported me while I was a writer. You've probably had the same experience. You stayed in an Airbnb and thought, this is doable.

Maybe I could rent my place on Airbnb. And it's really that simple. You can start with a spare room or you can rent your whole place when you're away. You could be sitting on an Airbnb and not even know it. Maybe you set up a home office during the pandemic and now you don't need it because you're back at work. Maybe you're traveling to see friends and family

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balance on Canada's highest rated financial app. Coho lets you earn cash back, earn high interest on your account, build your credit history, and so much more. You can also get 20 bucks off when you make your first purchase using the code daily still at can also get 20 bucks off when you make your first purchase using the code daily still at 20. That's 20 bucks when you make your first purchase using the code daily still at 20. Join over one million Canadians and sign up for your free trial now. Download the coho app today or visit www.coho.ca for more details. This is life. Life involves pain. At the end of the day, it comes down to,

I don't have control over it, and that makes me feel uncomfortable. When I try and fight back against that, I only make my life more uncomfortable. You can't do one without the other. When you're reading a book or listening to a podcast, or watching the video, there's a lot being thrown at you, right?

And you've got to try to follow all of it, you're trying to make sense of all of it. I kind of have a simple rule that's worked well for me over the years. So I just try to find one thing. Actually, this comes to us from Senica in one of his letters to Lucilius, he's saying, just find one thing a day. One quote, one idea, one exercise, one practice, he's saying, if you find one thing that makes you stronger, a wiser, you said, fortifies you against the chances of life, against poverty, against death, right? And so that's what it's about, just finding one thing a day. So when I'm

listening to podcasts or I'm watching videos and reading books, that's really my root. If I'm to get one thing out of it. And I've had the privilege now of doing the Daily Stood podcast, Podcast have interviewed hundreds of guests from all over the world, then over 150 million downloads. It's been this incredible experience, but it's also been an experience for me. I've gotten a lot out of it.

I'm Ryan Holiday, I've been running the Daily Stoke Podcast now for the last five years. I've interviewed hundreds of guests from all over the world who've done hundreds of millions of downloads. And in today's episode, I wanted to give you some of the stuff that I've taken out of it, clips that I've written down, notes I've written to myself,

things I've applied to my life from some of the stoic guests and not so stoic guests that I've been lucky enough to interview on the daily stoic podcast. And I hope all of them do as much for you as they did for me. When you find that sweet spot where they both work together, then you really have a big advantage. Because the mind is just like a fruity girl, when I was a kid, it needs the same kind of torture.

It needs the same pain, it needs the same kind of a push and resistance. And to more adversity that you go through, the stronger you get as a character, the stronger you character becomes, and the stronger you will become. So it's very clear, I believe in that very strongly, and I've always in the practice that. One of the St stoics said, we treat the body rigorously so that it's not disobedient to the mind. I think it's the idea that we're sort of cultivating this

when we feel that resistance, when we feel that doubt, when our body says, no, you can't run two more miles or you can't do two more reps and you push through that. That's what you need. Like when you're trying to pass redistricting and you fail the first time, and you fail the second. Like you need that part of yourself

that has trained the muscle that pushes past no or the first failure or that it's hard. You have to cultivate that sort of metamuscle that pushes through hard stuff. If you can go like, hey, this is what I'm trying to accomplish here. Then it makes it easier to make decisions about include it, not include it. And I think people are bad at this with life as a whole.

They don't know what they want their life to be, like what success is. So they just go, well, someone offered me a lot of money to do X or it's unpleasant to do Y. And so sometimes you do unpleasant things to get to a place you want to get. And sometimes you turn down lots of money or a cool opportunity because it gets you far away from where you wanna go. But if you don't have a sense of where you're trying to end up,

you're just making these individual decisions and you don't actually have the perspective to know what the best choice is. Yeah, you're totally right. And it's very hard to be able to see clearly all those things when you're 25. Yes, you know, I mean, like, at this age, I can look back and go,

oh, I understand why someone is unaware or not yet there to make those, is it which makes the people that are 25 and able to see that all the more impressive. In a way, I do remember having some of that clarity because when I was 21 and I was doing real estate in Boston, I remember being like, you know, you rent apartments, you show people their apartment,

and you get a crazy fee. Yeah. For a kid, I'm six weeks out of college. Some of my weekly checks were 2 grand, 2,500. I'm like, this is, this is life. Wild. Yeah, I mean, and I remember getting to September and being like, yeah, but I was like, this is fresh. This is a life. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, and I remember getting to September and being like, yeah, but I was just, it was eating me up that I wasn't performing. Yeah. I'm not performing comedy. And so I was like, I'm moving to LA and they're like, you know, you just made like, you know, I forget how much it was in a few weeks, 12, 15,000. It was clear I was going to make, I was going to be 21 and be making $150,000. Yeah. Now I didn't get that money yet, but it just felt like the writing was on the wall and that.

And I just was like, yeah, but I don't want to be showing you apartments. Yeah. At the end of the day, it comes down to, I don't have control over it, and that makes me feel uncomfortable. If I'm not in control of that, ultimately, at all points to, I'm afraid of dying. Yeah. And that's why, to me, the memento mori of all of the aphorisms is the one that means the most to me, because if I can get cool

with death, and Don Roberts' book, he talks about this where I'm gonna butcher this quote, but in speaking to death, he says, I've imagined you many times now pass through the gates of my imagination, let us visit his friends. That to me, that quote, and also, there was a soul you may know, he says, I've imagined you many times now pass through the gates of my imagination, let us visit his friends. That to me, that quote, and also there was a soul you may know, the story of a soldier approaches his general and says, Sir, your son is dead. And the general responds, I knew he was mortal.

Yeah, it's an epic teacher that's having a good heart. Somebody said, maybe 10 or 10, it says, Yeah, I knew it was mortal when I had him. That to me is everything. Because if I can bring myself to the end, that sounds cold and callous on the surface, but it is also to me the most loving thing is like, I knew that my son wanted to be in the army. I knew that he was going to take a risk, and if I had been a weaker father,

I would have prevented him from doing the thing that he wanted to do more than anything. I would have prevented him from being the person because he could have potentially gotten hurt. But I allowed him myself to assuage my fear enough to not stay in the way of him becoming the person that he wanted to be. And I knew that and I accept that. Even if it means it is the most crushing, horrific reality,

I can possibly imagine for myself. I knew he was more. I am wired to look for the self-prolining, but I'm just always like, okay, well, how can this be for me and how can I learn and how? And my partner is very much accepting, just like it is, it just is. And sometimes it just is. And he had been talking about that for as long as we had been dating. And I was just sort of like, well, we're gonna agree to disagree.

And reading that book was really helpful. I wouldn't say that I'm all the way there, but I'm so much more accepting of, especially people, of people that in the past, I would think, well, this is toxic energy, or this is, you know, this person, I'm talking about family members, like this person's crazy,

or that I'm just sort of like, it is what it is. And when I try and fight back against that, I only make my life more uncomfortable. Like it's that Byron Katie quote, defense is the first act of war, that when I try and like defend what I think should be true, because like I'm not upset that you're acting this way.

I'm upset because I think you shouldn't be acting this way. Yeah. So if I can just sort of accept that that is what it is and then go about my existence with or without you in my life based on how you're behaving, that has been huge for me. One of the most important things I tell authors and creators is you can't just be one thing. You can't just be an author, you can't just make YouTube videos. You want to have multiple incomes to do many things. That's where the sponsor of today's video comes in, Kajabi.

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to earn more doing what you love. What you love. What you love. I know for myself, when I speak about mental health and like, oh, here's a meditation practice you can put in or here's a way you can use gratitude to kind of make your life better on a daily basis. People really go for that. They love that.

They're excited about that. And I get it, you know, and because there are tools, practical tools that can make your life better. And people want to make your life better. And people want to make their lives better. They want to feel happier. They don't want to feel bummed out all the time. I get it. Not even bummed out all the time, overwhelmed by anxiety and depression and self-hatred. And they don't want to feel lost. So I get that. But I also hope that we can talk about, I guess, spiritual and philosophical tools to help us transform society because they, you can't do one without the other.

Do you know what I mean? The way we're in this relief toxic, we're a bunch of frogs in a really toxic pond. You can kind of like work on yourself in your little corner of your little lily pad and your pond. But as long as as there's war and dissension and disunity and across the pond, I don't know why I went to this analogy. Why did I go to this metaphor? It's not sustainable. It's a terrible metaphor. But we have to also clean up the toxic pond at the same time and address it. Totally. So they feed each other. The more that we work on our own personal spiritual

and philosophical selves, you know, finding meaning and hope and vision, then we can bring that to the world and we more we are a service in the world toward the quote unquote common good and that feeds our soul even more and it makes us even more kind of wise and arrived. [♪ Music playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background is the idea that sort of loving everything that happens to you, not resenting it, not fighting against it, not caring around a grudge or burden, but sort of embracing it and finding a good in it.

Yeah. Where does that fit in with our human nature? Well, it doesn't fit in because it's not natural to us. Our natural frame, our natural starting position is when something bad happens, why me? To feel sort of a grievance. A lot of what I'm talking about in this book is overcoming some of these natural elements of human nature and turning them around and using them for another purpose, another way.

And Morphati is very powerful in that you train yourself to accept everything that happens. It's like for Nietzsche, it was, this is life. Life involves pain. Life involves adversity. You're going to die one day and it's not going to be pleasant. Your friends and family members, they're going to die one day and it's not going to be pleasant. You're going family members, they're going to die one day, and it's not going to be pleasant. You're going to have failure in life.

People are going to hurt you. But that is life. That's what it is. So to resist that, to be angry about that means to not love life itself. So I'm friends with Derek Sivers and he had a catastrophic success. He sold his company for 30 or 40 million dollars or whatever and he said that he developed a practice. I don't know if he still does it but for a number of years, he would make a point.

So once a year, fly coach somewhere, stay in like a dingy hostel, you know, eat trashy street food, you know, basically put himself on the same budget that he had when he was 20 years old and just do that for four days. They remind himself of like, okay, this is normal life. Yeah, don't lose touch with it.

Well, there's a passage in one of Santa Caz Letters where he says we should do that every month. He said you should wear your worst clothes, eat the worst food, you know, sleep on the floor in your house. And he said the point of that, it wasn't just like play acting or anything. He was like the point was, he was saying that one of the one of the costs of success is actually not security, but a kind of fear because you're afraid of losing all the things that you're really comfortable with, right? And he's like, you want to, you want to get comfortable with the way that, by the way, most people alive currently live, you know what I mean? Like, it's very survivable what you're

afraid of, but you're afraid of it because it's unfamiliar to you because you've distanced yourself from it. And the whole point of this sort of practicing poverty and adversity was to be able to say to yourself at the end of that exercise, is this what I was so afraid of? You still go back to your regular or your good life, but you're not waking up in the middle of the night going, what if I get robbed, what if I get canceled, what if I fall off?

Because you go, the worst case scenario is I just go back to how things used to be. When I wrote The Daily Stoke eight years ago, I had this crazy idea that I would just keep it going. The book was 366 meditations, but I 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 wanna get the email, if you wanna bequarters of a million people would get this email every single day and would for almost a decade. If you wanna get the email, if you wanna be part of a community that is the largest group of stoics ever assembled in human history, I'd love for you to join us.

You can sign up and get the email totally for free. No spam, you can unsubscribe whenever you want at dailystoweth.com, Sasha 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. Adventure awaits inside the Camp Cue. Lapse, prizes, and fun are guaranteed. Enjoy this interactive family experience at CF

Sherway Gardens. So what is it? Step inside and find out. Visit the Camp Cue of now through January 21st at CF Sherway Gardens. Leave you there! Find out! Visit the Camp Cube now through January 21st at CF Shareway Gardens. Meet you there!