The Daily Stoic - At All Costs, Keep This| M Financial Group Talk

Episode Date: May 26, 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're exploring the life of Cleopatra. An iconic life full of romances, sieges and tragedy. But who was the real Cleopatra? It feels like her story has been told by others with their own agenda for centuries. But her legacy is enduring and so we're going to

dive into how her story has evolved all the way up to today. I am so excited to talk about Cleopatra Peter. She is an icon. She's the most famous woman in antiquity. It's got to be up there with the most famous woman of all time. But I think there's a huge gap between how familiar people are with the idea of her compared to what they actually know about her life and character. So for Pyramids, Cleopatra and Cleopatra's Nose. Follow Legacy Now wherever you get your podcasts or you can binge entire seasons early and ad free on Wandery Plus. Have you ever felt like escaping to your own desert island? Well, that's exactly what Jane, Phil and their three kids did when they traded their English home for a tropical island they bought online.

But paradise has its secrets and family life is about to take a terrifying turn. You don't fire at people in that area without some kind of consequence. And he says, yes ma'am, he's dead. There's pure cold-blooded terror running through me. From Wondery, I'm Alice Levine and this is The Price of Paradise, the real-life story of an island dream that ends in kidnap, corruption and murder. Follow the price of paradise wherever you get your podcasts or binge the entire season right now on Wondry Plus.

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, audiobooks 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.

At all costs, keep this. The Roman general Marcus Regulus had every reason to tell the Roman to accept Carthage's peace officer. Captured by Carthage, he had languished in captivity for five long years. Then he was given an offer. Go to Rome to negotiate a peace treaty and a prisoner swap. If the Romans accepted the terms, Regulus would be free. But if they refused, he had to return to imprisonment. Regulus accepted, giving his word that he would come back if the deal fell through. Completely disregarding his own self-interest, Regulus recommended that the Roman Senate reject the peace offer. Since Carthage was weak, why else would they send him as leverage? Rome, Regulus insisted, should press on and win the war.

The Romans decided to follow the advice and so, Regulus packed his bags. Not to rejoin the Roman army, but to return to captivity in Carthage. Even though Carthage was hundreds of miles away, even though Regulus had suffered enough, even though the Carthaginians were weak and reeling and highly unlikely to chase down a single man for breaking a promise. But that was the deal. That was the honor system he had been paroled on.

I have sworn them to return, he explained to friends who begged him to stay. I will not transgress my oaths, not even when they have been given to enemies. Regulus's story, which is actually the first chapter in Right Thing Right Now, which you can pre-order right now. It's an extreme story. I get it. Most of us will never face a test of integrity as severe as his, but we face smaller tests every day. The deadline we set, the promise we made, the plans we agreed to, the diet we committed to, the jog we were going to go on, the event we said we'd attend. And like Regulus could have, we can always find a good reason to break our word.

The deadline was unrealistic anyways. The circumstances have changed. The plans were tentative. The weather is terrible. We just don't want to anymore. The small tests and temptations are more consequential than we like to think. As Regulus explained, sure, if he went back,

he alone would suffer. But if he explains, sure, if he went back, he alone would suffer. But if he broke his word, the whole country would suffer because no one would trust the Romans anymore. In fact, that's the truly selfless part of what he did. By returning, by keeping his word, generations knew that you could trust a Roman unto death. Seneca loved this story and was fond of telling it.

To him, it was the essence of the virtue of justice, what we've been talking about so much lately. It's the power of a single person to become heroic. And that was there to inspire us to make us better. The thing is, you don't suddenly become a person who keeps their word even when given to enemies. That kind of person, Regulus, grows out of a lot of corresponding actions, a long history of keeping commitments,

a lifelong habit of not transgressing on your oaths. And that's what makes the really small things truly no small thing, as the Stoics said. They add up, they grow and they grow. They make the habit bonfire bigger and bigger. They confirm more and more what kind of person you are. And this is actually my favorite story in right thing right now, the new book, good values, good character and good deeds. You can grab that at dailystoke.com slash justice. You can also pre-order it on any of the other retailers

and we'll give you a bunch of awesome bonuses, which you can claim there. But if you want some signed numbered first editions, the Daily Stoke Store is the only place to do that. I've been working on this book for so long. I'm so excited to tell you this story. You can grab it at DailyStoke.com. I can't wait for you all to read this book. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Sunday episode of the Daily Stilett Podcast. I wish I had more stillness in my life. It's been a little crazy lately because of the book launch that book launches are always,

you know, inherently destabilizing. I had two podcasts I had to record yesterday. I've got a two hour one I have to do tonight. I've got to drive into Austin on Wednesday. I got to drive in Austin on Thursday. Next week, I got something in Canada. And then I think the week after that, I have to fly to New York.

And I'm gonna be doing a bunch of awesome media stuff. It's all awesome, right? It's all the things that when I was first thinking about writing a book, it's what I wanted, right? It's certainly better than the alternative where you don't get to do these things because no one cares. But it's destabilizing. And it's hard for me to sort of keep my center. And I say this because I tend to write books about things that I need or want more in my life. And stillness is that. I wrote Stillness is the Key in 2018, came out in 2019. I guess I sold it a little bit before that.

This is right around the time I was having my second kid. I was just trying to figure out how to figure out my life. You know, the Stoics have this word ataraxia, and ataraxia means sort of being free of disturbances even when you live in a very disturbed world. And we live in a disturbed world for so many reasons. I mean, first off, we live in this world that's spinning literally so, so fast.

People are zipping by so, so fast. And then the news and information cycle is so, so fast. And then it feels like things are crazy, right, and they are crazy and there's some things that are, feel like they're falling apart. And it's so noisy, I mean, noise pollution, even where I live out in the country, noise pollution is this real thing.

I opened the book with this story of Seneca just trying to concentrate and write despite all the crazy noise. Anyways, I say this because it's something I struggle with. So when I'm talking about these things, I'm this because it's something I struggle with. So when I'm talking about these things, I'm talking about them because I need it to. And so I was lucky enough to talk about some of these ideas to the M Financial Group in San Diego back in October of 22. I mean, talk about spinning faster than October 22. I'm trying to wrap my head around what was even

happening then where I was, how long ago that is. I mean, that is, I feel like since the pandemic, the time is just spinning faster and faster and faster. But I had a wonderful conversation about why stillness is so important for elite performance, but also just happiness and contentment and peace of mind and how it was difficult in the ancient world, it's difficult now.

And that's what we're gonna talk about in today's episode. They needed it because they're managing money. So they got to see big picture, but also take advantage of short-term trends. They've got clients coming at them. They have to succeed and beat the market or they can't stay in business. And at the same time, if they lose their mind,

they'll lose their shirt too. And so these are timeless stoic ideas, and I was really honored to be able to talk to them about it. And I think you're gonna enjoy this chat too. Plus, I mean, any excuse to get down to San Diego, which is just a wonderful, quiet, beautiful spot. If I'm remembering correctly, I think it was a bit crazy. I think I took my kids to Disneyland,

to Legoland and then Disneyland after. Yeah, I think it was a bit crazy. I think I took my kids to Disneyland, the Lego land and then Disneyland after. Yeah, I think I've got that right. So there was some, it was relaxing for a minute and then it got really crazy, but I was trying to be present and enjoy both the work and the play of it. And hopefully that comes across in the talk. When I do my talks, I do a lot of on obstacle,

a lot of new, I don't get to do enough on stillness. So I was really excited to get to do that. And I'm excited to bring that to you now. So enjoy. Well, it's good to be here. I do want to talk about ancient philosophy today, which I know when you think of a bunch of old dead white guys, you don't necessarily think modern solutions to modern problems. But if we go back to about the year 160 AD, a plague breaks out in Rome.

It's a devastating pandemic. It lasts for years and years, In fact, almost 15 years. Millions of people die. It overwhelms Rome's economy. It overwhelms its public health. It overwhelms every single institution that you would expect to be able to respond to something like this.

And it happens to be on this guy's watch. His name is Marcus Aurelius. They name it after him. It's called the Antonine Plague, even though it really isn't his fault. And, in fact, he becomes publicly associated with it for all of history. Again, not necessarily what he would have chosen.

And, in fact, if this was the only thing that goes wrong in his reign, he would have chosen that. And he deals with historic flooding. There's a coup attempt. He spends almost half of his reign at war. The borders are invaded. It's sort of one thing after another for this guy. And he keeps a diary.

This is sort of how we know how he's able to respond to it. He keeps this diary, which survives to us as meditations. It's not really a meditation. It translates to to himself from Greek. It's the most powerful man in the world writing notes to himself about sort of one thing after another that he's dealing with. And there's one moment in meditations which sort of staggers under the weight of all that he's dealing with.

And he writes, you know, it's unfortunate that this happened, which is like the understatement of the century. And it is unfortunate that it happened. But he catches himself and he goes, you know what? No, it's fortunate that this happens to me and that I've remained unharmed by it. And he tries to work himself back to a place where instead of feeling sorry for himself,

he sees the opportunity inside it. Not just the big opportunity, but the little day to day opportunities. It's this stoic idea that the obstacle is the opportunity inside it. Not just the big opportunity, but the little day to day opportunities. It's this stoic idea that the obstacle is the way. So I don't know what your all pandemic story was like, but mine started in February of 2020. I was in the process of opening a small bookstore in rural Texas, which is probably a bad idea

under normal circumstances. And it just became, again, one thing after another. It took longer than we thought. It cost more than we thought. Everything that could go wrong does go wrong. Elon Musk described starting a company as eating glass and staring into the abyss of death. It was a little bit like that. And then when we sort of got to the other side, then it was like, we can't open.

And then we could open, and then we were like, I'm not sure we want to open, right? It was not at all how we dreamed of this thing going. In fact, it was a little bit like arrested development. You know, I think I've made a huge mistake. We said that to ourselves many, many times. But at one moment, I tried to catch myself. Instead of sort of spiraling downwards, like,

what have I done? Where is this going? I wrote this little note to myself. And this is of spiraling downwards, like, what have I done? Where is this going? I wrote this little note to myself. And this is me holding it as I stared out over the monument to my arrogance, which was a fully stocked bookstore that couldn't open. I basically just wrote, this is a test. Will it make you a better person or a worse person?

And that's what Marcus is trying to do in The Obstacle is the Way. He's trying to remind himself that we don't control what happens. We control how we respond to what happens. This is, I think, a formula not just for individual greatness, but also this is what entrepreneurs do, this is what investors do. We don't control where the market is going, but we control how we orient what we do in response to what the market is doing.

We figure out what virtues this situation is going to draw out of us, what we're going to bring to it, what we're going to take out of it. So the bookstore does end up opening. That's great. My wife and I are still married, so I consider it a success in that sense as well. But it's been sort of one hell of an experience slash ordeal. But as I look back on that period, I see mostly the positive changes that came out of it in my own life. Not just because before I made most of my living traveling around, doing in-person talks, a lot of things that sort of went off the table for a good chunk of time that are starting to come back, but it forced me to re-evaluate a lot of things,

as I'm sure it did for all of you in this room. You could say that what we've been through the last few years is the largest forced lifestyle experiment in human history. Whole bunch of things that everyone said was impossible suddenly had to become possible. Whole bunch of things that we didn't think we could do, we had to figure out how to do. Five-year plans became five-week plans, right? Businesses that could only be brick and mortar, added an e-commerce element. We had to figure out how to do things differently.

You know, people talk about going back to normal. I'd say, you know, sort of normal is what caused it, right? And it also rejects the stokes, I'd say, the gift in front of us, which is the chance to think about and do these things differently. And the place that I found I was tested the most, the opportunities for the most growth in terms of doing things differently comes in a place where stoicism, Western philosophy, overlaps a lot with Eastern philosophy, what we would call stillness. Almost all the Western, Eastern, religious, spiritual, intellectual traditions have some word for this idea, slowing things down, of being at peace, right?

Even though the world is crazy, you are rooted in what you have to do, you are focused, you find a way to lock into what's in front of you, you find a way to connect to what you need to connect with, you find a sort of equanimity or stillness amidst the chaos. So what I thought I would talk about today is some lessons that we can take back with us as far as cultivating this stillness in our lives. Because I would argue that stillness is the key to elite performance in whatever you do. Personal performance, professional performance, happiness, accomplishment, achievement. If you can't get to a place where you've slowed things down, where you see things clearly,

if you're reactive, reactive, reactive, you're not going to be doing your best work. You're certainly not going to be enjoying the moment or the gifts in front of you or the obstacles or the difficulties in front of you. So I want to talk about some lessons for stillness. And my first is about getting up early. I like to get up very, very early. I live on a ranch in rural Texas. Get up early.

I watch the sunrise. Whenever I say this, people go, oh, but I'm not a morning person. And I get that. But I have some advice. This is a book I like to read my young children, who, by the way, forced me to get up early, whether I want to or not. But this will help you be This is a book I like to read my young children, who, by the way, forced me to get up early whether I want to or not. But this will help you be a morning person, I promise.

The reason you're not a morning person is because you're a bad nighttime person. You're tired, but you don't have the discipline to get up, go to bed. You're so tired, you think, all I can do is sit here and scroll on my phone. This is when we need to go to sleep. The Marines across the way there in Coronado would actually refer to this as sleep discipline. It's not a thing you wing. It's a thing you have to actively practice.

No one is at their best without proficient sleep or sufficient sleep. And so we have to keep this protected. So we can access what I think is the most valuable time of the day, which would be the morning. Toni Morrison, famously a single mother, decides to make it as a novelist. She has a full-time job as an editor at Random House.

And she found that to do the writing that she needed to do, she had to get up early and write before she heard the word mom in the morning. She had to work, she had to make contact, she said, before she heard the word mom. And I love this, the idea of like, when are you at your best? When do you think the most clearly? When do you have the fewest interruptions, impositions, distractions, right? And how do you own that space? Because this is when we do our best work.

So I get up very early, and the first thing I do is I go outside. I take my kids for a long walk. So it started with the single stroller, then the double stroller, and then we just recently graduated last week to no stroller at all, which was awesome. We did it outside this morning in front of the water.

The idea of getting up and going for a walk. To me, this is sort of getting the juices going. It's putting me in motion. Paradoxically, one of the best places to find stillness is not by sitting, but by moving. Getting out, seeing, we watch deer and rabbits. We watch the sun come up. We make contact, in this case,

not with something professional, but something really important personally. And I take that back with me when I start my work. And the first thing I do actually is journal. I take a few minutes to sit down and put my thoughts on paper. This is what Marcus Aurelius was doing in meditations. You can imagine why the most powerful man in the world, who had very few people to confide in, very few people he could complain to, very few people who could possibly even

conceive of or understanding or understand what he was dealing with, would need the space, the white space of the paper to work through what he was doing. So I sit down and I just talk about what I want to do, what I'm struggling with, what's been going on. Sometimes it'll just be recording some things that I did the day before, again just to sort of get the mind going and then you know the thoughts tend to pour out, oh you're worried about this, well does this really matter? Right, the Stokes felt like what we were doing in this journaling is putting our thoughts to the test, right?

So often we have thoughts, we have impressions, we have needs, we have anxieties. And they make sense, but only because we haven't fully articulated them. And by writing them out, we often see that they're incorrect or not fully comprehensive, or in fact, they're preposterous. And by having a tiny bit of distance

between us and our thoughts, can we get perspective? So I do the journaling. I use a couple different journals. Sometimes I do it on note cards. I just take this time, it's quiet time just for me, that I do my journaling. Anne Frank, in her famous diary, she has this great line. And it's one of the reasons I always do this journaling once

a day, ideally in the morning. She says, paper is more patient than people. So instead of dumping or vomiting these thoughts over on the first person you see in the morning or the first phone call you have in the morning, you've done it on the page. And it may be that some of those thoughts actually do need to be articulated to someone else.

They do need to be articulated to someone else. They do need to be worked out, but a good chunk of them don't. One of the most amazing documents, I think, in the history of the United States are the notes and journals that Kennedy took during the Cuban Missile Crisis. You can see, you can just Google them, you can see the doodling and thinking he was doing as he stared down nuclear annihilation. It's pretty incredible. He's reminding himself of things.

At one point here, he draws a sailboat just to sort of get as far away from what was happening as possible. He's just doing reminders of what matters, right? So it doesn't matter if you're doing the journaling in the morning. It doesn't matter if you're doing it at night. Some of the Stokes did it in the evening. It doesn't matter if you're doing it on a notepad in the middle of a meeting. The point is, you take some time to put your thoughts down

on the page. Actually, and then the idea of going outside. One of my favorite Kennedy stories is after the missile crisis, after the world is saved, he sends a note to the White House gardener to thank her for her important contributions to world peace. He'd taken these long walks in the White House rose garden as he was trying to work his way through what was happening.

And so we need sometimes the outdoor space, the walking, the putting ourselves in motion to get in the right headspace. And then, of course, these are Da Vinci's doodles and journals. I saw this in Milan right before the pandemic happened. And again, you see what happens when someone, he would actually carry his journal on a string on his belt. So whenever he had an idea, whenever he had a thought, whenever something popped into his head, he could write it down.

This is an important process that I would urge everyone to do. It's almost impossible to separate philosophy and journaling because they are the same thing, right? Philosophy isn't this thing that you just think about. You have to work it out on the page. My next rule, my next sort of practice for stillness is that we do the hard thing first, right? There's the expression, eat the frog, which is a derivation of a quote that's been misquoted,

misquoted, misquoted. But it basically just says, if you want to make sure everything else in your day is positive pick Pick a live toad eat it in the morning and everything is better than that, right? But what the way I Translate that the way I think about it the way I practice in my own life is that I do the hard thing first Right. I don't put it off till later in the day. I don't make excuses. I don't pack my day with busy work at the start.

I do the hard thing that requires as much uninterrupted focus and concentration first. That's what I'm getting up early to do, in part, right? Before the phone, before interruptions, before I have made up a million reasons why I'm not going to do it today, I tackle that thing first. So for me, that's writing. You might think that as a writer, I like writing.

And I do to a degree, but there is an expression that sort of captures the job. It says, painters like painting, writers like having written. I like the part that happens after I've done my writing for the day, after I've bled myself out a little bit, after I've struggled with the blank page, then everything's great. So I stack the day with that hard thing first. And I know that if I fill it with fun stuff first and I say, oh, I'll get around to this

at two in the afternoon, I don't have the energy, I don't have the focus, I don't have the discipline needed to actually pull that out. I'm not gonna be in the right head space. So for me, thinking that, and almost everyone in this room does some form of knowledge work, that knowledge work requires you to be at your freshest and best, right?

Just like an athlete wouldn't do a bunch of other stuff before they play the game, right? The game is the thing. The day is built around. We have to build our routines around the same thing. So I do my note cards. I do my writing. I do my note cards, I do my writing, I do my creative knowledge work first,

and then I move on to administrative stuff. I don't schedule breakfast meetings, I don't schedule coffee meetings, I don't get on the phone in the morning until I've done my hard thing, which actually is a really important rule for me, which is I don't use my phone for the first one hour that I'm awake almost minimum.

So ideally it might be two hours, sometimes it's three hours. Don't use my phone the first thing when I wake up. I was talking to a friend of mine, he says, you know, I know you shouldn't use the phone in the morning. So what I do is I get up early and then I check my phone and see if there's any fires I have to put out. Then I go into my routine.

And I was like, but you never don't find them, right? Of course, if you look for things to do, you're going to find them. And so I think that's what we do. We know that the things in our email inbox, we know that the text we get, the news we have to read, we know that it actually isn't time sensitive. We know that it actually can wait,

but we tackle it first thing. I think because we enjoy it blowing up our day from the beginning, subconsciously. The amount of people that I know that like deliberately ruin their day by checking social media the second they wake up to see what so-and-so tweeted, to see what's going on, right? We start the day off on the back foot in a reactive space. Instead of protecting that space, instead of going, I need to be in the right head space to do what I do. Don't want to be reactive.

I want to think long term. I want to be intentional about what I'm doing, which I think needs to be built around limiting our inputs. And then we can get to them later. There's a famous story about Napoleon. He would check his mail like two or three weeks after it came in, because he knew that most of the mail

would resolve itself by then. But we check it first thing. We're one of 20 people CC'd on an email. We jump into the fray to respond. If we'd waited two hours, chances are 10 other people would have done it by then. The best thing I heard about the email inbox was someone described it as a to-do list put together

by other people. So we start the day instead of with our own to-do list, with our own set of priorities, with our own intentionality, we start it reactive from the beginning. And again, like if you're waking up at noon, you're probably gonna have to check your email, but if you're waking up early you've got space to be intentional to carve out what you want to be thinking about. You know, if you pull up your screen time app and you see how much time you're spending on this device, it's never like, oh, I should spend more time on the phone. No one has ever saw that.

And I think it has a lot of other effects too. It's not good for your mental health. It's not good for your perspective. It's certainly not good to tie you to reality. It screws with your priority. But I think if you look at that time and just ask yourself, what could I have done with that? What could I have accomplished with that?

Who could I be if I was a little bit more disciplined, if I was a little bit more protective of my space and time, especially early on? Right, I think if we're thinking about knowledge, what it's really about is how much one can concentrate, how much uninterrupted focus you can give to whatever the task is in front of you.

Now, this doesn't mean that we move to a monastery and we throw our devices in the ocean and we never do them. We do have to cultivate the ability to be still inside the chaos. There's this fascinating letter that Seneca writes in Rome right around the time of the turn of the millennia. And you know, the police are arresting someone downstairs. There's a vendor selling something.

You know, there's animal. There's all this noise. It's basically indistinguishable from, you know, New York City on a busy morning as well. And he's realizing that he has to be able to tune this out, and that's true, but that doesn't mean you deliberately seek out that noise, and you don't try to limit it where possible. So we think about this concentration,

we think about this focus, and I think the big question to always ask is, am I using the device, or is the device using me, right? Social media, like, it's free, because you're the device using me? Social media, it's free because you're the product. You're what's being sold. And when we realize that these things are abusing and stealing from us, stealing our most valuable research which is our attention, we can claim a little bit of that back.

And one of the ways we do that, not just with social media, but with all things, if we want to have stillness, if we want to have uninterrupted focus to give to the things that are important to us, it's going to require saying the magic word. A mental skills coach in professional sports is telling me this story once. He says, early on in a baseball player's career,

it's all about swinging at pitches, right? You don't make it into Major League Baseball without swinging at a lot of pitches and showing that you can swing at pitches and you can hit the ball very far, right? He says, but then as soon as you make it into the league, it suddenly becomes all about pitch discipline, right? It becomes all about not swinging and swinging only at the right pitches. Right. And so players have a lot of trouble making this transition because they were defined by being aggressive, going on the offensive, and then suddenly they're forced to rein that back. And I think that's a metaphor for all of us. Right. You get where you got

by saying yes to things, and then you have to learn how to say no to things you have to say hello no to a lot more things that you say yes to and so actually this coach he sent me this sign which I hang on my wall between two pictures of my children and it's a dr. Oliver Sacks who had in his office a giant sign behind him that just said no exclamation point which someone someone reminded me that the word no is a complete sentence, which I thought is a great way of thinking about. You have to be able to say no, and you have to say no a lot. This is the ideal day in my calendar,

which is to say nothing is scheduled, not because I like chaos, but because where I'm not going to do anything that day. I just don't have an interruption at 1.30 p.m. I don't have a quick 15 minute meeting at 2 p.m. My space is an already promised to someone else from the day, from the jump, from the minute that I wake up.

My rule for my assistant is no more than three things can ever be scheduled in the calendar in one day. And that she should be saying no far more often than she is saying yes. This is a letter that the writer E.B. White sent to the chief of staff of the President of the United States. I am declining this prestigious honor for secret reasons. No is a complete sentence. They would say of the Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor,

one of her clerks said, you know, what I admired about Sandra is that she never said sorry before she said no. She just said no. And the point is, you have to be willing, you have to protect the space. Now, I was much better at saying no the last three years when there was a very vivid and clear reason to say no, right?

Suddenly, you weren't being asked to do as many things. And I think all of us noticed that our productivity went way up because we weren't being imposed on. We weren't saying, well, I didn't want to say no to all of them, so I said no just to this one. Or I didn't want to say no, so I said maybe. Or I said, let's talk about it later. And then you get roped in.

You have to say no a lot. And the point is that everything you say yes to actually is saying no. When you say yes to something, you're saying no to something else, just as when you're saying no to something, you're also saying yes to something else. And realizing that when you are being a people pleaser, when you're not having the discipline to say no

to protect that space, what you're doing is either stealing that from something, right, or preventing yourself from focusing on the things that actually matter. This is one of my favorite tweets of all time. Could the meeting be a Zoom? Could the Zoom be a phone call? Could the phone call be an email?

Could the email be a text? Could the text be unsent, right? Could this actually be nothing? If I just didn't respond, what would happen? Nothing would happen, right? People are very keen to take your time more protective of their own time. Seneca talks about how he says people are extremely protective of their property and of their money, and then they just give away freely the only non-renewable resource in the world,

the most precious thing that there is, the one thing that no one can get more of, which is time. Alice and Matt here from British Scandal. Matt, if we had a bingo card, what would be on there? Oh, compelling storytelling, egotistical white men and dubious humour. If that sounds like your cup of tea, you will love our podcast, British Scandal, the show where every week we bring you stories from this green and not always so pleasant land. We've looked at spies, politicians, media magnates, a king, no one is safe.

And knowing our country, we won't be out of a job anytime soon. Follow British Scandal wherever you listen to your podcasts. So Mark Spreler says that with every task, with everything we're about to do, with every action we're about to take, we have to ask ourselves, is this essential? He says, because most of what we do and say, most of what most people do and say is not essential.

And he says, when we stop doing the inessential things, that's great. We stop doing them. But we get the double benefit of doing the essential things better. So what is the essential stuff for you? What do you actually have to be doing professionally and personally?

For me, it's just a constant reminder. When I'm saying yes to things, I don't want to hurt someone's feelings, I am hurting the feelings of a six-year-old or of a three-year-old, right? I'm not going to be home at the time that I normally would be home I'm not going to spend as much time with them because I agreed to let someone pick my brain Which is a nice euphemism for picking your pocket Right, you're not protecting the most precious resource that you have. So you have to say this magic word, not just occasionally, but all the time, more often than not.

And I'm not saying that so you can work all the time. Actually, on the contrary, you need to have time and space just for you. One of the things I think we discovered in the pandemic, suddenly people started baking bread or trading for a triathlon. We started exploring hobbies, right, which seemed like this fun distraction, this sort of indulgence, but in fact make us better at what we do.

Churchill has a nervous breakdown after the First World War, and his sister-in-law gives him a children's paint set, and he falls in love with painting and he paints almost daily for the rest of his life. Now he was not a good painter, you can go to Chartwell and see these paintings, almost none of them are good. That wasn't the point. The point was that Churchill was better for having painted them. It forced him to be present, it forced him outside, it forced him to be patient, it forced him to do something that he was not good at, like he had to practice something that he was bad at.

He was starting over at the beginning. It forced him to be whimsical. It forced him to be all these different things that he otherwise wouldn't have been. In fact, he actually writes a book called Painting as a Pastime. It's a beautiful book. And one of the passages in the books,

he says, the cultivation of a hobby and new forms of interest is of the first importance for a public person. He said, to be really happy and really safe, one ought to have not just two or three hobbies, but they all must be real. They must be physical. They must actually force you to practice a craft. And in Churchill's so-called wilderness years,

one observer goes out and sees him. And not only is he painting and writing every day, but he would spend four hours a day laying bricks. He got really into brick land. He builds this wall all around his estate, including one that has a dollhouse for his daughter. This still stands. And obviously, you would think that's

not a good use of one of the most powerful people in the world's time. But it's forcing him to be present. It's forcing him to step back. It's forcing him to just do what is in front of him. And we can imagine he has some of his best ideas doing this. You need to have a hobby like this. Actually, as he's leaving the Casablanca Conference,

Churchill drives five hours. He sends his chauffeur to drive him five hours so he can paint a sunset in Marrakesh. You can imagine all the stress of the world that's bearing down on his shoulders in this moment. It goes out to paint something, just to take his mind off of it for a few minutes. We all have to have these kinds of hobbies. There's one funny story about Churchill.

He's staying at the White House. He walks down the hall. He steps into the Oval Office. He sees the light on. And FDR is in there. And FDR is late at night. You think maybe he's poring over papers. He is.

But actually, he's poring over his stamp collection. FDR is an avid stamp collector. And you can imagine, again, these are two of the most stressed out men in the world, and they're indulging these hobbies, and if they have time for them, you have time for them, and you understand that these weren't just silly past times, these were ways of centering themselves, getting to a place of stillness that they

could bring back to their work. It makes you better at what you do. I think also what powerful, busy people, again, I think the pandemic reminds us is the importance of relationships, the cultivation of relationships. If you're all about business, if your personal life suffers, again, you're not going to be as good as what you do. Churchill would say that his greatest accomplishment is convincing his wife to marry him, which

I can imagine many people in this room might agree with. You need to have people that you go home to, right? You need to have people that balance you out. There's many moments in those wilderness years where Churchill is anxious and ambitious and driven and wants to dive back in the fray and probably would have if left to his own devices. But it's his wife who sees what this sort of rehabilitation process is doing for him, sees the transformation he's going under, and she holds him back in a good way. So oftentimes people think relationships are really having a great... it holds me back, it'll pull me down.

It will, it pulls you back down into reality, it prevents you from spinning off the planet, this is really important. So we have to again balance this sort of work and life balance to cultivate these things because they give us the perspective and the priorities, the clarity that we need to do that work well. We always say, I'm doing this for my family. But if you never see your family, are you really doing it for your family?

The best expression I heard is that love is spelled T-I-M-E. So go back to that calendar. All sorts of things scheduled in our calendar, we know all the places we're committed to be, but how often if we were to truly audit that calendar, right? Just like if you truly audited what you ate, you go, I eat pretty healthy, right? I put my family first. But is the evidence actually there? Right?

And again, forced to spend more time at home than we usually would, forced to re-evaluate how we did things. We realized that some of the compromises or sacrifices that we were making were not quite clearly so necessary. I think about this as I tuck my young children in at night. There's a sort of haunting stoic exercise. Mark Cirilli says, as you tuck your children in at night, say to yourself, they will not make it to the morning. He's actually meditating on the mortality of his children,

which is like the most insane, difficult, painful thing you could possibly do. It's not about detachment, although sometimes that's what people think Stoicism is about. He's doing this so he can be present. He's reminding himself, why am I rushing through this? Why am I trying to get this over with? We think about you're on the phone with your spouse

or your children, and I've got to wrap this up. To do what? To check your email for the 40th time today because you paused something on TV and you want to get back to it, or you have this meeting that you don't want to be late for. We say that our priority is this, and then we end up prioritizing all these other things.

And we create this conflict between the two. Then we wonder why we feel rushed or we feel like one is not as healthy as it could be. The idea is that when you're rushing towards something, just as when you're saying no or yes to something, when you're rushing towards something, you as when you're saying no or yes to something, when you're rushing towards something, you're also rushing away from something. So ask yourself, what am I rushing away toward? What am I rushing away from?

And what am I rushing towards? And what's actually truly important? So this idea of being present, being where you actually are, this is why Churchill is practicing his brick laying and painting. This is what I think exercise can do for us. If you haven't seen Marina Abramovich's greatest work, she sits in a chair for hours and hours and hours every single day for almost three months straight.

She's just fully present. She has no devices, nothing she can look at. She can't say anything. They can't say anything to her. She's just fully present. It's one of the great feats of physical endurance of all time, but also a feat of immense emotional and spiritual discipline.

And people who would sit across from her to actually be across a person who's fully present from them, even for a few seconds, they would break down in tears. And you ask yourself, how often are you actually present, actually doing the thing you're doing? Or are you thinking about the next thing? Are you ruminating on the last thing? Are you wondering if it's doing well?

We sort of see ourselves from above as we do it, or we're multitasking. Multitasking, the Stoics would say, is the great enemy of presence. I think one of the best ways to be present, one of the practices that I have that I cultivated in my life is exercise, is your strenuous exercise where you're working so hard that you can't be doing anything else, you can't be on the phone, you can't be thinking, you're

just locked in to what you're doing. And I know physical exercise and philosophy, they kind of feel like polar opposites. But the Stoics would say that the philosopher must engage in difficult activities, must train themselves. In fact, that philosophy itself demands a strong body. So my physical practice, cultivated, perfected, or optimized during the pandemic, is that I run, swim, or bike every single day. This is my goat bucket just walking along the fence here.

But I do some form of strenuous exercise. I love swimming the most because there's no screens. There's nothing to look at. It's very low impact, and it's very meditative. There's also something sort of sensory depriving about being in the water, just sort of locking into a physical activity. This also can be a great hobby.

This is why I think CEOs find themselves training for Ironmans or weightlifting competition. Having something that you're working on that's not your job that you really lock into, I think, is extremely important. And people go, oh, I just don't have the time. This Theodore Roosevelt, when Theodore Roosevelt was president, he tried to get a couple of hours of exercise every single day, a couple of hours. Right? You definitely have the time. People who are much busier than you, they make the time, they have the time, we all have the time. He would go on long walks, He would take cold plunges.

He would train in jujitsu. Actually, he loses his eyesight in one of his eyes from like a karate accident in the White House. But I think it's about getting a win every day also, right? Again, during the pandemic, when there was so little to do, you're like, I'm going crazy inside my house. I'm going to go for a walk. I'm going to go for a run.

I'm going to go for a bike ride. It's about doing something productive, something that you control, something that makes you better. It's about deciding who's in charge. I mentioned Deirdre Roosevelt doing the cold plunge. I do that every day, too. I like to do three or four minutes in a very cold, cold plunge, usually about 40 degrees.

You just sit in it. It forces you to not think about anything else but the freezing cold that you're in in that second. You have to manage your breathing, and you're just there, present. But most of all, right, it forces you to strengthen the muscle of deciding who is in charge, right? Seneca says that we treat the body rigorously

so that it's not disobedient to the mind. The idea being that we boss ourselves around on the track, on the bike, in the pool, in the cold plunge, right? This morning as I was getting ready, I do this every time before I do a talk, take a nice shower, and then I crank it as cold as I can and try to last in it as long as I can. Are there health benefits to these cold plunges and stuff? Some people say that they are.

I think the benefit is the cranking of the handle, of the deciding who is in charge, of making the active choice that you decide what you're going to do. You actively do the hard thing, right? Jumping in the water when it's cold, pushing yourself even though your body says, I'm tired, I don't want to do. You actively do the hard thing, jumping in the water when it's cold, pushing yourself, even though your body says, I'm tired, I don't want to do more. Developing this muscle is the muscle that controls all the other muscles. It's the one you need the most.

I know I'm talking there about sort of forcefulness, but then we also balance that out with the kind of the exact opposite. The Stokes would talk about the art of acquiescence. It's another thing we learned during the pandemic. How vast the world is, how immensely out of our control it is, how powerless we are in the face of so many things. And the Stoics have to practice letting go a lot.

There's everything that's happening in the world, and then there's this tiny little bit that we control The Stokes would say there's stuff that's either up to us or not up to us Epictetus says that our chief task in life is really just making this distinction This is what they teach in 12-step groups as well But it's this idea that the vast majority of what's happening in the world is not up to us. And we have to focus our energy on what is up to us so that we're not focusing on what is not up to us at the expense of what's up to us, right? We only have so many energy points.

The Zokes would say we have to learn how to practice the art of letting bad things happen, of meditating on the fact that we're not the grand decider of things. What we focus on is how we respond to those things. Going back to our media diet, so much of the reason we feel angry and impotent is that we seem to actively seek out information that reminds us of this fact. I remember a couple years ago, there was this hurricane heading towards Texas.

And I'm watching it, you know, do we need to evacuate, do we need to do this, what should we prepare? Thankfully it wasn't that bad for us and then a few days later there's a hurricane in Florida and I'm tracking it on the Weather Channel the exact same way as if it's going to affect me. It's not. That's not to say I don't care about the people that are suffering and ultimately will suffer as a result of what's happening.

But why am I watching information in real time that it is impossible for me to do anything with? I think many of us became familiar with the concept of doom scrolling during the pandemic. You're frustrated. You're exhausted. You're tired. Sit down on the couch.

And you just mainline as much terrible news as you possibly can until you're so depressed and impotent and angry and sad that you don't know what to do with those feelings. The best thing you could do is cultivate a media diet, cultivate some discipline that steps back from this process. Of course, the duty of every citizen in a democracy is to be an informed citizen. Watching CNN or Fox News or MSNBC or Facebook or whatever it is that you're consuming your

information, that's probably not the best way to do it. There are these things called books that talk about things from a bigger vantage point that are designed to stand the test of time. Right? Thinking about our information diet, Mark Shibulis at one point says, remember you always have the power to have no opinion, right? You always have the power not to think about things. Again, this isn't to say I don't care about other people, I don't care about suffering, but it is to say I'm going to decide what I focus on, I'm going

to limit my inputs so I could focus on the things that don't matter. And again, accepting the fact that things are never going back to normal, because normal doesn't fucking exist. It never has. It's a made-up illusion. Things weren't normal before. They're not normal then. We say it's so unprecedented.

Actually, if you had studied history instead of breaking news, you'd realize this is very precedented. This happens all the time. In fact, this exact same thing happened 100 years ago. If you had studied history instead of breaking news, you'd realize this is very precedented, right? This happens all the time. In fact, this exact same thing happened 100 years ago. It happened 50 years ago, right? And it will happen again, and realizing again that we have the power to have no opinion

about things that are not in our control. So this idea that stillness is the key, getting to a place where you're not spinning, you're not reacting, where you're in control of the decisions you make, of the inputs you let in, of what you say yes to, what you say no to, how you orient your day. This is really important because that headspace, when you think about when you have done your best work, when you have been happiest, you weren't doing 500 things

at the same time. You weren't stressing about something that might happen or already happened. You were fully present. You were fully locked in. You were practicing good habits. you were in good shape, right? You were fully optimized as a person. That's where we want to be, not just in moments of crisis, but in all times.

General James Mattis would say, he's a student of the Stoics, carries them with him when he travels, he said the single biggest problem of leadership in the information age is a lack of reflection, lack of solitude, too much noise. And I would say you could really just sum this up as a lack of stillness. You need the space, you need the time, you need the inner self-control to be able to actually reflect on what's in front of you and give it everything that you have. Like, everything that we do in life is hard, and a lack of stillness makes us worse at it.

Stillness makes us better at it, makes us capable of unlocking those moments of great performance that we've had and known. I try to wrap up my day with a walk also. Go for a walk on the farm, watch, this is the Violet Crown in Austin, watch the sunsets come in. Sometimes I go and see my pet donkey buddy, his buddy.

I bought him on Craigslist for $100. He's actually very, very smart. He can open the back door to my house. But you know, he's often just kind of standing there. He's just standing there. This is what he does all day. Sometimes he steals copies of my books. But anyways, he just stands there.

I remember thinking one day, how dumb is this animal? He just stands there. And then I realized this is his job. His job is just to stand there. Not just because donkeys are livestock guarding animals, but because there's nothing anyone has to be doing. As long as he doesn't die, that's a pretty good day for him.

And it's true for us too. And the Stokes would say that one of the ultimate ways to cultivate stillness is to meditate on precisely that fact. The idea that we are mortal, I have this ring, sometimes I carry a coin in my pocket. The idea that, as Marcus says in meditations, you could leave life right now, let that determine what you do and say and think.

And you can imagine the urgency of this thought in the midst of the Antonine Plague, a hundred times worse than COVID. There's no medical treatments, there's no understanding of it. The best treatment they have, they thought if they burned incense, it would ward

the spirits or the illness away. And so death was like literally floating in the air. You could smell it. And so he's meditating then on the fragility, the ephemerality, and the shortness of life, which we all need to do because it puts things in perspective. It reminds us that the things we're worrying about don't really matter. It reminds us that the things we're worrying about don't really matter. It reminds us that the things we're regretting

don't really matter. What matters is now. What matters is the present moment, what you have in front of you, who you have in front of you. Seneca would say we have to balance the books of life each day, just as we balance the books of our business. But I think his most interesting way of thinking about life and death, he says, is that it's a mistake to think of death

as something in the future that you are moving towards. He says, actually, death is happening now. It's with us always, not just because people can go at any moment, but because, he says, the time that passes belongs to death, right? It can never be brought back. And so he says, don't think of this thing that's going to happen to you once, but instead think of it

as something that's happening to you always. And that how you spend your time is how you choose to spend your life. And that to fritter it away, to waste it, he says it's not that life is short, it's that we waste a lot of it. We think we have more of it later, when in fact what we have for certain is the moment in front of us now.

So the question is, of the last three years, of the last 30 years, of whatever years you have left, is how are you going to spend them? What are you going to have to show for them? Who are you going to be in them? And I think stillness, presence, connectedness, equanimity, poise, ataraxia, as the Stokes would call it, is the place that you need to be to have a good answer to that question. So thank you all very, very much. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes,

that would mean so much to us and would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on Wondery.com slash survey. Remember those stories and fables that would capture your imagination and you couldn't wait to see how they would unfold? And now when you read them as an adult you think some of these old tales could use a fresh spin. We have a perfect podcast to bring you the stories you remember, remix and reimagine for the kids in your life today. Join me, DJ FU, and my trusty turntable, Baby Scratch, as we spin up new tales in the new

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