The Daily Stoic - Ask Daily Stoic: Ryan and UT Basketball Coach Shaka Smart Talk Self-Control and Using Your Time Wisely

Episode Date: June 13, 2020

In today’s episode, Ryan and University of Texas basketball coach Shaka Smart talk about focusing on what you can control, how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected college basketball, and more.Coach Shaka Smart has been involved with college basketball since 1995 and has been a head coach since 2009. In 2011, he led the VCU Rams to a historic Final Four finish at the NCAA Tournament. Since then, he has become the head coach at UT Austin.This episode is brought to you by WHOOP. WHOOP is a fitness wearable that provides personalized insights on how well you’re sleeping, how much you’ve recovered from your workouts, and how much you’re stressed out from each day. It’s the ultimate whole-body tracker for someone who needs an all-in-one solution. Visit WHOOP.com and enter STOIC at checkout to save 15% on your order.This episode is also brought to you by GoMacro. GoMacro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors—the perfect fuel for your summer expeditions. Visit http://gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order over $60, plus free shipping.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanholidayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanholiday/Facebook: http://facebook.com/ryanholidayYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Shaka Smart: Twitter: https://twitter.com/HookEmSmartInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/coachshakasmart/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 Stood Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wondery'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. 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 stoic, something that can help you live up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics.

We interview stowed philosophers, we reflect, we prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to worker to get the kids to school. When we have the time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring. Ah, the Bahamas. What if you could live in a penthouse above the crystal clear ocean working during the day and partying at night with your best friends and have it be 100% paid for?

FTX Founder's Sam Bankman Freed lived that dream life, but it was all funded with other people's money, but he allegedly stole. Many thought Sam Bankman Freed was changing the game as he graced the pages of Forbes and Vanity Fair. Some involved in crypto saw him as a breath of fresh air from the usual Wall Street buffs with his casual dress and ability to play League of Legends during boardroom meetings. But in less than a year, his exchange would collapse. And SBF would find himself in a jail cell

with tens of thousands of investors blaming him for their crypto losses. From Bloomberg and Wondery comes Spellcaster, a new six-part docu-series about the meteoric rise and spectacular fall of FTX and its founder, Sam Beckman Freed. Follow Spellcaster wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, prime members, you can listen to episodes Add Free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today.

Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. Today, my guest is one of my favorite people, someone I've gotten to know here in Austin, coach Shaka Smart, who's currently the head basketball coach at University of Texas. Shaka first reached out to me, he'd read the obstacle is the way. And when he moved here to Texas to take over his head coach, he reached out. We had breakfast at 24 hour diner there in Austin. And just a friendship has come out of that.

We've talked about a number of issues. He's turned me on to stuff. I feel good to know that I've turned him on to some stuff, gotten to know his wife pretty well. His wife is an advocate for literacy for kids. She's a writer herself. So it's just been a wonderful relationship. Actually, Coach Smart is how I met George Ravlan, who we recently had on the podcast. It's been really cool to get to know him. It's been

cool to watch him rebuild the long horns. I've got to go to some games over the years. He came out to my farm a couple years ago on my birthday and caught his first fish, which was fun. Shaka, of course, has the fascinating first name Shaka, which he was given in an honor of the famous Zulu warrior. He was previously the head basketball coach at Virginia Commonwealth University or VCU, who he took deep into the tournament, total surprise in 2011, he took VCU to the final four, which was completely unprecedented and unexpected. So he knows all about winning. He also knows about having difficult seasons. It's been a rebuilding process at Texas.

And he's an interesting basketball coach. He's known for his style of play, which they call the Havoc. They sort of wreaks havoc on his opponent's psyche and their plans, which is fascinating, especially when you get to know him as you hear in this interview what a sort of calm, collected kind, and sort of present individual he is. But I think,

you know, just because you're, you've got a Zen Buddhist mentality, doesn't mean you can't be a killer on the basketball court. I think Phil Jackson's a great example of that. So anyways, it's been wonderful to get to know Shaka. It was great to see them win an NIT championship last year, although I can only imagine what it was like this year to watch the season and so prematurely. But here we are, you can listen to my conversation with Shaka and go Longhorns. It must have been so strange for you because obviously there were some coaches and leagues

where they were about to gear up for the season, but your season was going into the home stretch, the thing you trained the whole year for when all of this happened. That must have been really surreal and disappointing and strange. It was unlike anything that we've ever been through. We were actually riding on the court getting ready for our conference tournament game against Texas Tech, and they canceled the tournament about 30 minutes before

we played and then we called the guys off the court and into the locker room and so I'm standing there in front of the team and the conference tournament had been canceled but the NCAA tournament had not yet been canceled but we kind of knew it was the end of the season just you could kind of feel that it was heading that direction. So it was a strange, strange ending to the season. What do you say to kids? And I guess to yourself, when you have to deliver news like, how do you, what did you say?

Well, fortunately, we didn't have any seniors on our team this past year. So luckily, we weren't having to talk to anyone that literally had their career ended abruptly. But at the same time, these guys put a ton of emotion and passion and energy and time into what they do. And as you mentioned, the regular season is a lot of work to gear up for the most enjoyable time of the year,

which is March, was the postseason. To have that taken away from our guys, it was a tough pill to swallow for them. We just try to prioritize their health and their well-being and to help them understand that they have a support system around them to get through all this, and that there are some unknowns in the future for sure, but that we would get through it together. Yeah, I mean, obviously there have been all sorts of people who have been affected by this in much more serious ways, but it is kind of heartbreaking to think about the things that people that are not health or sort of livelihood. But athletes who were training for the Olympics

that might not have another year in them or as you said seniors who were training for the tournament or even seniors in high school will never get to go to their senior prom now. It's just sort of heartbreaking to think like time is this thing that you don't really get do overs for. For sure. And one thing that I've learned during this time is to try to help people not necessarily compare their adversities because it's really easy to sit there and say, well, you know, I'm going through this and I've been affected in this way by COVID. And, you know, that's worse and what this person is going through.

The reality is everyone's been affected and everyone is having to be flexible and adjust in certain ways. Certainly there are some folks that are dealing with much, much tougher hardship than we are and so I think having that perspective helps. But at the same time, not belittling the way that you feel or trying to hide from that,

just being very, very present and aware of what you're feeling and what emotions you have. Yeah, I guess like the one, it's not a positive, but it is true that we are all in the same boat. You know, even a billionaire is facing losses from this, even a professional athlete is looking at time they can't get back. Almost everyone has been disrupted in some form or another.

And we could all wallow in how we've personally been wronged or we could maybe feel and lean into that connection that we all are in the same boat. Absolutely. It all comes back to you and I talk about this all the time, it was just are in the same boat. Absolutely. It all comes back to, you know, you and I talk about this all the time, it was just being in the present, being in the moment and taking advantage of the opportunities that are there.

I think, you know, one of the things that we try to help our players understand at this time is that it's very, very easy to succumb to human nature and your normal habitual thought patterns when you're at home. You think about it. Our guys are on campus training literally over 11 months a year. So typically when they go home, they want to chill. They want to relax and get a few days where they're just not doing much of anything.

Well, now we're in a different situation. They're going on two straight months being at home. So it's more about trying to find ways to move forward and grow. And my wife always tells me if you're bored, you're boring. So finding ways to occupy your time when 60, 70, 80% of what you normally do, you can't do. Well, to come back to that in a second, I was thinking one of the things you told me, which I think sort of aligns well with the Stoics

is that as a coach, you try to, you know, obviously focus on what you control and you try to get your players to focus on what they control and that you try not to criticize anyone for, you know, it was the shot a good shot. That's what you care about, not did the shot go in or not and so on and so forth. It also strikes me that what we're all experiencing is a massive reminder of how little life is is in our control. Absolutely. I mean, I think what our minds do, Ryan, is try to assert a level of control over our lives.

And our minds are really good at playing these tricks. is try to assert a level of control over our lives and our minds are really good at playing these tricks, but the reality is, and COVID-19 is a reminder of this that there's much, much more out of our control than there is that's under our control. And I told you, I used one of the coins you gave me every day I look at it and on the coin it says, just that you do the right thing, the rest doesn't matter. And so doing the right thing starts with understanding what you can control.

Yeah, and I feel like one of the things I'm trying to do is sort of, so accepting that I don't control what the governor of Texas does and don't control what the president does, I don't control what the governor of Texas does. I don't control what the president does. I don't control what the Chinese do or whatever it is. And so that is created a scenario in which large parts of my business aren't operating. I'm stuck in my house. We're both in the same boat there.

But what I do control is a whole lot of smaller personal decisions. What time I wake up, the habits that I practice during the day, the reading that I do, the things that I focus on, and all of that. When you talk about doing the right thing, I'm curious what what is doing the right thing look like for you day to day right now and maybe what kind of habits are you pushing your players to think about as well. Well to be honest with you Ron, this time's been really good from that standpoint

to be intentional about making decisions. How are we gonna spend our time? What are we gonna prioritize in conversations with our players? Because there can be a tendency to try to do too much. And I think that's a mistake as well because that affects the quality of what you do. For me personally, I've been able to spend some really good time in the mornings on just,

I guess what I would call spiritual growth, which is just coming closer to having an elevated level of consciousness of what's going on and then being able to create a small space, I call it a gap in between whatever it is that I'm feeling or thinking and the actual awareness or essence of who I am. I know that that sounds really philosophical, but it's really helpful if you feel that gap to be able to make decisions, thoughtful decisions about how to spend your time. So for our players, we're encouraging these guys again to not necessarily succumb to normal habitual thought patterns, you know, normal habits, and instead, you know, choose one or two or three things each day that you're going to be intentional about doing, you know, whether it's reaching out to someone that you

wouldn't normally talk to, whether it's reading something that you normally wouldn't read. We try to leave it relatively open-ended so that it can be the choice of the individual because as you know when something is put on someone and someone's made to do something then again that affects the quality of it. No, that's an interesting point. I heard some good advice from someone along time of the day. If you look at the to-do list of really powerful and important people, it's always very short. It's like make this phone call or read this report or go here.

Go to rap. Go to rap. Go to rap.. Well coach, he taught me this and obviously he's so wise and has been through so many twists and turns in his life, but he literally told me he said, I try to do one high quality thing every day. And now the one thing he does is really, really, really impressive, but that struck me. I mean, they say simplicity is a ultimate sophistication.

I mean, that is high level. But if you think about it, that one thing that he does is always really, really impressive. Obviously, when you say one thing a day, that doesn't sound like much, but then when you multiply it out over 82 years, that does start to add up. And I think one of the reasons

we're probably suspicious of the, just do a couple things well every day strategy is that we're not good at extrapolating out, sort of steady, compounding returns. That's why we're bad at saving for our retirement. You know, it's why we're bad at sort of planning and anticipating things. I guess what I'm saying is what I'm noticing

and happier with is that I'm doing my to-do lists are shorter, but the things are more important and I'm giving more time to them. And I'm not doing a lot of inessential things that maybe because I could do them before I feel obligated to do them. Well Ryan as my wife Maya reminds me the root of the word priority is singular. So when priority was first talked about it was yeah it was a singular word the one one thing. And what we've done in modern times is turned it into priorities, but then all of a sudden it turns into 8, 10, 15 things,

and like, sure, it's the purpose. No, that's brilliant. I don't know if you know Gary Keller and Jay Papazon, who are both here in Austin. Gary Keller is the founder of Keller Williams Realty. They wrote a really good book a few years ago, called The One Thing. It's so hard though, I imagine, like even the athletes that you see,

like by definition, they are multi-hyphenates. They're not allowed to be just athletes. They have to be student athletes. And then of course, they're men and citizens and friends. And so we have all these competing priorities or we have all these competing obligations. And I think it's really easy to fill up your to-do list and not ask yourself like, what's the most important thing

I have to do today? What's your most important thing, Ryan? I mean, professionally my most important thing is like I have to do writing and and similar to the thing which you're traveling if I if I can write a little bit every day that adds up to you know finished editable manuscripts at the end but I I sort of say I have three three things that are important to me every day which is my work as a writer, my role as a husband, and then my role as a father.

When I think about my goals, I don't have like career goals or life goals. I just want to be good at those three things, and I don't want to have any regrets about those three things. I love it. It must be hard for coaches, though, and I imagine that this is kind of a forced experiment for you in a different lifestyle. Coaches work these insanely long hours, they're gone all the time.

You're sort of expected to live and breathe the job. Is this opening your eyes at all? Is it creating any changes for you, you feel? Well, I think it has created for everyone an opportunity to step back a little bit and just reassess how you spend your time and not even so much about whether you're working or doing something else, but literally exactly how are you doing that? Where are you physically? How are you going about it?

Because we've all been forced to adjust in that way during this time. It's interesting. I'm not one that typically works a lot from home. I like to be in the office. So this has been an adjustment for me in a major way in that just time wise, you know, I'll find myself maybe working late at night when I never really would have done that before. I wouldn't have been working at midnight. I would have been lining down or you know reading or whatever it may be. So again, I think it's like anything else. Like we tell our players it's on us to be intentional on the front end about how we want to handle it.

It's definitely been you know good for me to just learn what works and what doesn't. Yeah, I asked a coach one time, or I think it was a GM or something, and I said, let's say all the coaches in the NFL unionized, and there was some rule that set the hours that coaches were allowed to work. So like, let's say some law or regulation passed that like coaches could only work bankers hours like nine to five. I was like, my question is, I'd be curious what you thought. Would the actual quality of play on the field change at all? Or I don't know if you know what Parkinson's law is, Parkinson's law says basically a task expands

to fit the amount of time you give it. So if you have a 20 hour work day, you'll find 20 hours of stuff worth to do. If you have a 10 hour work day, you'll get it all done in 10 hours. And I'd be curious as a coach, who yeah, there is this expectation of the grind, always be doing, you gotta be the first one there

and the last one to leave. How much of that do you think is 100% essential? the grind, always be doing, you got to be the first one there and the last one to leave. How much of that do you think is 100% essential? And how much of it is just sort of expectation, obligation, and maybe even a little bit of just like keeping up with the Joneses as far as like the published habits of other coaches? I think there's plenty of that, Ryan.

But to be honest, it's really more about quality. So, sure could work, you know, a hundred and some hours a week, and there's always more to do for sure. I mean, there's always another recruiting call you can make. There's always at this moment, another Zoom call. But that doesn't necessarily add to the quality and the impact that you're actually having. Like one of the things that we emphasize as a coaching staff is spending time with players. Someone taught me a long way that, hey, you need to understand there's a difference between spending time and actually connecting. And so there can actually be, you know, quote unquote, wasted time, if you will.

If you are, you think you're spending time, but it's not meaningful time, it doesn't build connection. So I think that's the more important thing for us. There's probably coaches, just like any other line of work that work about half as much as someone else, but that actually get a lot more done. And at the end of the day, at the end of the day create better results. No, I think that's a great parenting lesson.

It's something I struggle with. It's like because being a good dad is important to me, I go like, well, do I need to be at the office or I'll be at home? You know, like I feel obligated to be at home office? I'll be at home. I feel obligated to be at home. So I'll go home and I'll sort of pat myself on the back for going home. But then the reality is, I'm not actually there.

My wife will sometimes go like, hey, you know, you could just be at the office if you're not going to be here. And that strikes me as something you talk a lot about, which is just sort of being where your feet are, is actually concentrating and being present. Yeah, I think Ryan, it goes back to just the workings of our own minds, which is fascinating, because we vacillate between these different modes of thinking, I need to do this or I need

to do that. And then literally, you know, you'll be in one mode and then through the back door, they'll be, you know, the personal mind will say, well, wait a minute, you didn't finish that project yet. And so again, one thing that hopefully all of us can take out of this is just the element of quality that we want to infuse in whatever it is that we're doing. And again, as you and I've talked about this,

the number one detriment to that quality is task switching. So you're doing one thing, and then all of a sudden you switch over to the other one because your phone buzzes. And again, the quality is never heightened by that. It's only hurt. How do you talk to your players who are basically in the most vicious spot as far as being young, being hormonal, being technology obsessed? How do you talk to them about the cost of that switching and how to focus?

Well, the one thing you can't do is bang them over the head with it because they'll turn you off real quick and one thing I've learned is these guys, unlike you and I, they literally grew up as young kids with social media. So it's a different childhood, it's a different experience. To me, the best thing to do is provide education through different vehicles that are compelling to the players. And so, for instance, if we can find an example of something that LeBron James does or did

that is a kind of best practice that would make sense for our guys to follow, whether it's mindfulness or the way he handles social media during the playoffs. That type of stuff is really compelling for them because of course he's a hero of theirs. Sure. You know, hitting them with some academic study that was done at Stanford or Harvard, that doesn't do nearly as much as something that's more anecdotal. No, it's funny, that's sort of what the Stoics talk about. Sena Kuzlin says, you have to choose yourself a Cato.

And Cato is the hero of most of the Stoics. And you know, he didn't write anything that was sort of how he lived. But the idea of, you know, he says, without a ruler, you can't make crooked straight. And this point was you have to have people or heroes for sort of your rulers or your benchmark, and then you're constantly comparing yourself against them and asking, you know,

what would they do in this kind of situation? How can I be more like them here? What would the, you know, and I think that's super helpful when you're young, but I got to imagine you have coaches like that that you evaluate yourself on sort of heroes in the profession that you're in. Absolutely, yes. It's definitely a profession where there are plenty of examples Ryan to compare yourself to.

Now, we have to be careful as well because comparison is the thief of joy. Sure. We tend to, as coaches, maybe compare ourselves to someone that's at the absolute top of the field and that can lead to a level of insanity. But what I try to do is compare less results and more process. More hot of these guys go about what they do, how are they successful, maybe where did they trip up that I can learn from? Sure.

I tend to find that sometimes the best coaches to learn from are actually coaches in other sports. Football for me is one that's really, really fascinating because their dealing was such a larger number of players and the messaging that they use with their teams has to be so multifaceted to really hit everyone that they're dealing with. So those are coaches that I follow very closely.

Yeah, sometimes I go back and forth between being very envious of coaches and then being very glad I'm not coaches in that what you do is so binary. Like, as a writer, do you compare yourself again, someone who's won more awards or someone who's sold more copies or someone who's in a different genre or not? Whereas sports, it's like, you know, there are literal rankings and there's standings and there's your win-loss record over your career. On the one hand, it must be kind of a relief.

Like, you know, did we do well in this game tonight? Who won? But on the other hand, that's gotta be way too simple. How do you think about success? Is it winning or losing? Is it something else? I think that's so important for the individual to define what success means to them.

And then obviously for all of us, we're trying to move towards something greater. So even if you're able to find success on one particular night or one particular season, it's really more about where you're going. So it's interesting. Obviously, coaches are completely evaluated from the outside in on the results of the games.

But actually, I got into coaching because for me, someone that was raised by a single mom, it was coaches for me that served as mentors and father figures and the guides for me to become a full grown man. And so I really got into coaching because the way that those guys impacted me, I wanted to impact other people in a similar way. That's a completely different evaluation from winning or losing a game or what your record is at the end of the season

So it can be a little bit more complex at the end of the day You just have to decide what you're about and what you're comfortable with How can you know whether you're doing that right like it must be much harder to know whether you are having Impact whether you're changing lives. It not only because it's hard to measure in a box score or something like that, but also it occurs over so much of such a longer time span. Like, you know, my second grade teacher didn't know she really had impact on me until 20 years later or something like that. And I asked John Wooden one time, he had signed a great recruiting class

and he was in the midst of winning all the national championships that they won at UCLA and they said, is this the best recruiting class that you've ever signed? And his answer was awesome. He said, ask me in 20 years. And what he's saying was It's not so much about where these guys are now or even about what they're gonna do over the course of the next year two or three It's about you know who they become long term and again, you know some coaches may not look at it that way. We do live and work in a line of work that's very result-based.

But I love that philosophy of like, who can we help these guys become? And what role can we play in positively impacting their minds and their futures? Yeah, there must be immensely satisfying to see the players that you coached that are now in the NBA, especially players that maybe people didn't think had that in them. That you must take a lot of pride in that, but I've also got to imagine you have players who have all sorts of professions, because you've done it a long time. And some of that must be even more rewarding than knowing that somebody made millions of dollars or made it to the All-Star game or something like that. The thing that's the most rewarding Ryan is guys that are taking significant steps down their own personal pathway of growth. And so that may be professional, something like the NBA. It may be spiritual. There's about three or four players that I used to coach that now are about five or six, seven years removed

from Kyle's basketball. And now they're doing all this neat stuff that hopefully we planted a seed with when they were young, stuff like meditation practice every day, or the mentoring they do for young guys. And again, that's really what it's all about, is people are people through other people. So can we impact someone else that then goes and impacts the next person? And that's really what coaching to me is all about.

I've got two last questions for you. So you've had great seasons, you've had bad seasons, you've had incredible runs into the tournament and you've had years where you didn't make the tournament. How do you sort of think about the sort of amazing success and how do you think about those like the heartbreaking years? Because I imagine there's a lot of people who are sort of feeling some whiplash right now.

And I'm just curious, as a coach who wins and loses on a regular basis, how you, if you've thought about how to integrate that kind of, those kind of results in your life. Yeah, that's a great question. I think it goes back to what you said about control. And then really deciding how you want to define yourself because we talk to players and young people all the time about having

a growth mindset. And it's interesting. A lot of times we ask our guys to do things that we don't always necessarily do a great job doing. So do you define yourself by that absolute best season you had, do you define yourself by the worst season? Or is it more about how you can grow and develop and learn from each of those seasons?

I think the longer your coach, the more you're going to find yourself in different situations, situations where you have to adjust. Situations that, to be honest, would give you a level of humility that maybe you didn't have before. So it's all about enjoying it, Ryan, and trying to be a little bit better and a little bit more impactful on the people that you get to coach than you were the year before. I love that. And I've heard it from a bunch of different coaches, but it's sort of a standard line now. It's like, you know, the coach just wins a championship or, you know, a super bowl or whatever, and he sort of pulls all the players into the locker room.

And he says, don't let this be the best moment of your life. In a weird way, I almost feel like responding to that insane victory almost has as many challenges as an insane defeat. For sure. Yeah, and not to get too philosophical on you, but in any anything that happens that is great, there's always a seed of you know something that's not so good. And then anything that happens that is really tough and

a setback, there's a seed of positive you know opportunities from that. So I think having an awareness of of those things is huge. And remember, we're dealing with, in a lot of cases, teenagers. So it's on us to help them see that. So this last question, it's a little personal so you can dance around and however you like. But it must be strange to be in your profession where, you know, there's

rumors about, you know, are you going to be fired or not, you know, are you going to get a, a new contract or not? There's sort of that in the ancient world that is sort of this, the myth is the sort of domically is, they're sort of the king and someone's very jealous of the king and he says, well, why don't you live in my shoes for one day? And the guy says, okay, I'd love to sit on the throne. And the story goes, basically, the king sets this up, but the guy doesn't realize there's a sword dangling over his head the whole time. And this is the message is, hey, actually, it's not so great to be the king because there's always this thing kind of hovering over you. In this, you know, it's sort of economic uncertainty and that now all of us are in the same

boat on wondering how do you, as a person who has to show up and do a difficult job all day, how do you keep that out of your mind, how do you focus, how do you not let it bother you, how do you not let it keep you up at night? Because it seems like it would drive me nuts. Well, you know how I do it, right? I do it by just doing the right next thing and trying my very, very best to focus on what's under my control. Trying my very, very best to stay aligned with the principles that I believe in and really

setting the right example for the people around me to do the same thing. The job that I have, that the coaches have, it's a fascinating job. I think most importantly, we need to look at it from a standpoint of being grateful, to even be in this position. but let's be honest, it's a very, very public forum. You're, you know, what you're doing is, at least in terms of results, is very, very out in front for people to see and people to criticize.

And it is one of those jobs that, you know, a lot of people have opinions and maybe feel like they could do something better. And so again, I think approaching that with humility and understanding that some of that stuff you don't control, the enjoyment that we get out of affecting the people that we work with and that we get to get to mentor is very, very special compared to maybe a normal nine to five job, but then also understanding the impermanence of everything we do. Somebody told this is

helpful to me Ryan. Somebody told me a long, long time ago I was at a coaching clinic and he said you need to understand that all coaches are replacements. So you are replacing someone else and then at some point down the line, someone will replace you. And again, I think that that aligns well with a lot of the, you know, the store philosophy that you talk about and the fact that if we take ourselves really, really seriously, it's easy to think that you're the only one

who's doing what you're doing, who's ever done it that way, and it's the center of the universe. But the reality is, and again, COVID-19 has been as good of a reminder of this as anything, that couldn't be further from the truth. Yeah, there's William Manchester as a great line. He says, you know, people who think they're indispensable are almost always wrong. And who won the Super Bowl six years ago?

Who was the coach at Texas basketball for coaches ago? Who's won the third most games? You know, like nobody knows that answer. And yeah, that's what Marcus really is talks about. He's like, okay, maybe people remember Alexander the Great, but do they remember Vespassian, who is the Emperor who came a few before him, or do they, he's like how unfamiliar

these names quickly get? And I don't think the point of that is like none of this matters and that what we do is meaningless. I think it's more like, as you said, don't take it too seriously. Don't assume that the world is revolving around you and try to be a good person inside all of this because that is the one thing that does seem to have the most lasting impact on people. Well, and what really matters is the moment. It's the now.

So even if you're Ryan Holiday is being written about 100 years from now, as this great writer or on to me any good, but yeah, I mean, it's about now. And the thing that is also said by championship coaches, when you win an unbelievable championship or go on a great run, is always the journey and the process to get there is so much more powerful and so much more important

than actually the moment when you win it. And there's almost a sense of like, okay, this is it. And that's why coaches and athletes are so driven to go do it again because they want to feel that feeling of pursuing something, of going after something. So, you know, for me, as long as I have that opportunity, you know, and I can help our guys to move forward and grow and, you know, be part of something special,

then that's where my focus is going to be, and that's a lot easier for me than getting caught up and stuff that's outside of my control. Yeah, I mean, the first time one of my books hit number one, it was like I was mowing the lawn, and it felt great for three seconds, and then I had to finish mowing the lawn, you know? And that sort of a femoral feeling actually didn't compare at all to the countless hours that I spent on the project, you know,

the pride of the making progress and the pride of, you know, the pride of the, of making progress and the pride of, you know, getting this thing out into the world and hearing from people that had it impacted. But yeah, you're right. We tend to gravitate towards the results, but really it's the things that created the results that were, was most enjoyable. Absolutely. Well, I appreciate the impact that you've had on me. And I really, you know, when I first got to Austin,

I enjoyed sitting down with you and learning from you and obviously reading your books, but it's been great to continue to have a relationship and learn from you. No, it definitely, it definitely goes both ways and thanks again. You got it, thanks for having me. If you're liking this podcast, we would love for you to subscribe. Please leave us a review on iTunes or any of your favorite podcast listening apps. It really helps and tell a friend. 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.