The Daily Stoic - Ask Daily Stoic: How Do You Recognize What's in Your Control?

Episode Date: February 22, 2020

Ryan talks about speaking to service members at Aviano Air Base in Italy. Ryan reads a passage from Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit. You can also find these videos on the Daily Stoic YouTube channel.See 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 Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoke. Or each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at alestowac.com. another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up.

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Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of Ask Daily Stoic. So I just got back in, and I was telling you a couple of weeks ago that I was flying to Av in, I was telling you a couple of weeks ago that I was flying to Aviano, the NATO base to speak to the men and women in the U.S. Air Force.

It was crazy. It was quite a flight. I flew from Nashville to Dolas, to Frankfurt, Frankfurt, to Venice, and then I drove from Venice to Aviano, but it was incredible. To speak to people who, again, it's so easy for, I think, for the philosophy to become this abstraction, to come, this thing you talk about and think about. But you realize, like,

dozism is this thing that you're meant to do. It's stockdale parachuting into that prison camp. It's someone, you know, getting three weeks notice that they've got a new posting and they're having to move from wherever they are to the middle of Italy. It's somebody going through the separation got a new posting and they're having to move from wherever they are to the middle of Italy. It's somebody going through the separation of being far from friends and family.

It's someone struggling with PTSD, right? It's someone struggling to pass a physical test. It's someone paying their dues. It's someone putting their life on the line for the service of their country. To me, that's what stoicism is actually about. That's what we're studying. That's what we're practicing, that's what we're trying to do. And so, so, it's just really humbling and inspiring to be around these warriors, but also philosophers. One of the things we we did talk about is Stephen Pressfield. Stephen Pressfield is the author of a book that's very

popular in the military called The Warrior Ethos, and a book called Gates of Fire. My favorite book of his is The War of Art. I'm gonna talk a little bit about him in next week's message because he came here and I got to interview him. But, you know, I've been on the road a lot speaking. It's been tough, it's hard to be away from family, but I just so believe in the stuff that I'm talking about that any chance I can

to get it in front of people and walk them through it. Like I know it's gonna have an impact on their lives. And yeah, it's just an honor to do this. And so thank you for listening. I think we got a great episode for you this week. Can't wait for you to hear it. And of course, if you got questions, send them in at infoatdailystog.com.

So I wanted to do a little reading. this is a passage from Twila Tharp who wrote an amazing book called The Creative Heaven and I quoted it in Stillness is the Key and I thought I'd read that passage and then maybe riff on it a little bit. She has this exercise. She says, sit in a room and let your thoughts go where they will. Do this for one minute. Work up to 10 minutes a day of this mindless mental wandering, then start paying attention to your thoughts to see if a word

or a goal materializes. If it doesn't extend the exercise to 11 minutes, then 12, then 13. Until you find a length of time you need to ensure that something interesting will come to mind, the gaelic phrase for the state of mind is quietness without loneliness. And then people seem to kind of like magically want ideas to just come to them, they wanna have epiphanies, they want to figure out what their passion is, what they wanna do in life,

but they're not actually creating the space or time in their lives for that to happen. So, have you ever just sat with a piece of paper and written out ideas? Have you ever actually just talked into a microphone? Have you sat in front of a blank word document and written? Like, you have to create time and space for your mind to wander and explore and figure out what's important to you. And I think we're so busy, we're so active, we have so many inputs coming at us all the

time that we really don't have any room for that, and then we wonder why are, so we don't feel creative or why we don't have ideas, why. But other people seem to be such fountains of inspiration and creativity and we're not. You have to actively carve out that space for you in your life and that requires in some ways more discipline than being busy and active. To say no, I'm just gonna sit here and look out the window. I'm not gonna put headphones in.

I'm not gonna turn on the TV. I'm not gonna pick up a book, right? I'm not gonna answer email. I'm just gonna do nothing. I'm gonna do nothing deliberately and consciously and intentionally. And I'm going to do it for the uncertain payoff of insight sort of creativity. It's hard to do, but I think more important than ever. That's kind of what the idea of stillness is the key is really about. And I think Twiathan's book, The Creative Habits, is a great resource for anyone looking to explore that.

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That's macweldon.com, enter promo code Stoic. Welcome to another episode of Ask Daily Stoic, you send me Rhine Holiday questions to info at Daily Stoic. And then we answer them your pressing thoughts, questions, concerns about this ancient philosophy that we both love. Today's first question is from Terry. He said, I love the control how you play a message. That's something we talk about from Marcus Aurelius

and Santa Cunapictetus. You don't control what happens. You control how you respond all that an athlete, a politician, a leader, thinker. Controls is how they play the game. They don't control what the game does to them or what other people are doing inside the game. So he says, I recognize that I believe I control more

than I actually do. I think I can fix things. I think I can influence others' behaviors. We talk about how to recognize what is or isn't in your control. I mean, this is the million dollar question. And I think the Stokes are pretty black and white. They're like, you control this, you don't control that.

The truth is there is stuff that's kind of in the middle. Like, I control the book that I write, but I don't control how many copies it sells, except there are decisions, choices, actions that I take that influence how likely it is to sell. Like, certainly by not doing anything, I am increasing the chances of it not selling. And so, or there's a person back there

who's making a bunch of noise out on the street. And so I don't control that, but I do, I could go tell them to stop. We have some influence, but not complete influence. And so, I think acknowledging that there is some gray area is important, but really I think what the Stoics are talking about is just making sure you're focusing on and you're not tying your identity up in things that are not up to you.

That's sort of how I take it in my life. So there's things I control, there's things I don't control, and there's things where I'm understanding that I have influence, but I can direct them, but I can't ultimately control them. All right, so Jim says that there are 52 weeks in a year, and that he's thinking about implementing one voluntary discomfort strategy each week.

What are some strategies to intentionally go about practicing voluntary discomfort of a mentalism? Well, first off, I love this idea. I think this is great. We might even steal it. This could actually be like a daily stowed project at some point. But the idea of testing yourself, pushing your boundaries, getting outside your comfort zone

on a regular sort of systematic basis is going to make you a tougher, stronger, more resilient person. One of the reasons I love endurance sports, why I love running and why it's part of my routine, is like, it has toughened me up to the point where like, I don't have to worry about whether I can handle difficult things. Because I experienced it enough on a daily basis

that I know that I pushed through, that I know that I'm not a quitter because I've been at points in a totally arbitrary meaningless activity where everything in my body made me want to stop doing it and I had the willpower to keep going. I think that's what endurance sports, whether it's running or swimming or biking or whatever.

That's what it's training you to do. Miracami, the novelist, he's a distance runner, he says like running is both a metaphor and an activity. And the metaphor is like your teacher yourself that you can persevere. So, I mean, cold showers would be a great thing to do. You know, quitting things, giving things up would be a great voluntary discomfort activity,

doing things that make you feel self-conscious or embarrassed, doing things in a new way. We interviewed David Epstein and he talked about the velvet rut, or the rut of competence, like when you get in a comfort zone and everything is exactly how you want it, that's a comfortable place to be, but not a place that's making you grow, you grow when you are outside of that. So I think what I'd be thinking about as I'm coming up with these activities is like, am I just subjecting myself to pain for the sake of feeling pain?

No, it's am I learning, am I getting better, am I strengthening my power of will over myself? Because that's why we're doing this. The whole point of it is to improve and increase your willpower, your ability to make your mind, will your body to do something that wouldn't naturally be inclined to do or sometimes to make your mind think about something that it is not naturally inclined to do. That's the whole point of this.

Think about that. Is it actually adding a skill to your skill set or giving you confidence in your ability to do something? That's what matters. Justin says, what do you think of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and how it relates to being a stoic? Also, how can I further my studies on stoicism? Are there any camps, training facilities, whatever? So, I actually was doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu when I was writing obstacles the way. I lived in New Orleans, and I would go to an awesome, I think it's called Nola BJJ, I even thank my Brazilian

Jiu-Jitsu professor at the end of it. I haven't done it in quite some time, I sort of got away from the training, I've just been busy and I found that I still wanted to run or swim every day and I just don't have the time to do multiple hour long exercise activities. So I think there's a ton of parallels between stoicism and wrestling. Marcus markets really uses the metaphor of stoicism and philosophy being similar to the approach of a boxer or a pancreatist, which was a early form of mixed martial arts in the Roman Empire. So there's lots of interesting overlaps you can see.

Clearly the stoics were so familiar with wrestling and fighting that it sort of permeates their writing in the way that like, you know, football analogies might appear in a politician's speeches. As far as like training in stoicism, I think stoicism is something that you train yourself in by the reading you do, watching these videos or listening to this podcast, that's one, reading the books, like, how is Mark's really training in philosophy? Well, one, he had a philosophy instructor, his name is Junius Rousticus. He thanks him at the front of meditations. You can look at that, and he's someone I profile in, lives of the Stoics, which will be coming out in the fall of 2020.

But so he had a philosophy teacher, and then he was doing his reading in philosophy, but then he was regularly writing and discoursing with himself and with others about stoicism. That's what meditation is. That's what Senaqa's letters of a stoic are. Kato would have long dinner parties where he would talk about philosophy. So I don't think there's a school that you go to, but it is something you have to actively build

a practice of in your life. The only other thing and not making too much of a sales pitch, but we did build this program daily stoke life, which you can check out at dailystoke.com slash life. There's a bunch of, it's also just on the daily stoke page. But like we did sensing that people wanted to train with each other, they wanted to talk to each other, they wanted, you know, the daily stoke email seven days a week,

they wanted access to other stuff, they wanted our courses for free, all that kind of stuff you can get if you sign up for daily stuff. So that's where I'd start. But I think this impulse you have to take your training to the next level is really great and should be encouraged. I think one interesting part of stoicism is that or philosophy. This isn't something someone can give you.

There isn't just a place that you show up. It's more of an inward facing practice that you have to build. It's a routine you develop in your life. That's where this is gonna come from. So great question, Terry, Jim and Justin really appreciated. If you guys have more questions, you can email us at infoatdailystoke.com.

Don't just have to be questions about stoicism. These can be specific questions. They can be advice you want in a life about specific problems, whatever you want, email us info at dailystoke.com. And we will see you next week. You can subscribe to us on YouTube obviously, or you can listen to this on our podcast. We're going to our email at dailystoke.com.

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