The Daily Stoic - Can You At Least Be This? | Ask DS

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

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Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. I've been writing books for a long time now and one of the things I've noticed is how every year, every book that I do, I'm just here in New York putting right thing right now out. What a bigger percentage of my audience is listening to them in audiobooks, specifically on Audible. I've had people had me sign their phones, sign their phone case because they're like I've listened to all your audiobooks here and my sons they love audiobooks we've been doing it in the car to get them off their screens because audible helps your imagination soar. It helps you

read efficiently, find time to read when maybe you can't have a physical book in front of you and then it also lets you discover new kinds of books, re-listen to books you've already read from exciting new narrators. You can explore bestsellers, new releases. My new book is up, plus thousands of included audio books and originals, all with an Audible membership.

You can sign up right now for a free 30-day Audible trial and try your first audio book for free. You'll get right thing right now, totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, for free, visit audible.ca to sign up. to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks, some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street

when there happened to be someone there recording. Thank you for listening and we hope this is of use to you. And we hope this is of use to you. Can you at least be this Epictetus saw the cream of the Roman crop? Hadrian, the emperor dropped in on his classes. The emperor's best family sent their most promising students to him. He himself studied under Mussonius Rufus, who is known as the Roman Socrates. Epictetus may well have bumped into Seneca while they both worked in the administration. Yet for all this, Epictetus was pretty disappointed in what he saw.

"'How much I'd like to see such a Stoic,' he once said. "'One who actually lived up to the teachings managed to be happy in all circumstances, be they exile or death, adversity or success. He'd been looking his whole life,' he told his students, and he'd not found a one. So despairing of perfection, he lowered the standards, lowering them to one much more reachable for all of us. If we can't be a true sage, he said, let's at least try to be someone actively forming themselves on the model.

Let's at least try. He was saying that while we might never measure up, we can at least do our best. We can show ourselves to be someone making progress, someone committed to the fight, someone who refuses to accept that there isn't hope for us, that we are all we can be in this moment. None of us are perfect stoics. Epictetus wasn't, Marcus Aurelius wasn't. We're going to slip.

We're going to fall short, dismally short short most likely, but we can't give up. We must show that we are trying, that we're actively transforming ourselves to get and to be better. We can at least be that. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. It's funny, I think whenever I do a talk in Las Vegas, I seem to inevitably be put up

at Caesar's Palace, which is always funny to be going and talking about the Stoics, talk about Cato, talk about Marcus Aurelius, talk about Seneca in Caesar's Palace. And so back in March of 22, I gave a talk for DG media, they had this thing called momentum builder, it was this really cool event, there was a ton of people there, I think there's like 3000 people there, which was surreal. Again, to be talking to 3000 people about Stoic philosophy in Caesar's Palace felt a bit unreal. And anyways, it was a great talk, I talked about obstacles away. And then I did a little Q&A after and I wanted to bring you some of those questions. Now the mic wasn't perfectly picking up the audience.

So I'm going to sort of give you the gist of their questions. I'm trying to get better at repeating back the question so it records it for me. But basically the first question was like for someone who follows the Daily Stoke, maybe listen to the podcast or follow us on for someone who follows The Daily Stoic, maybe listen to the podcast or follow us on social, but they haven't read the books, where would I start? Well, thank you for the interest of course. I would say what I've tried to do in my book,

The Daily Stoic, and there's a free email as well, so this doesn't sound like a sales pitch, is I think sometimes we think like, oh, I've read that book. I've got it. And I'm really interested in more the process of reading and rereading and coming back to something. So what I try to do with the Daily Stoic and with the email

is it's one page a day, one thought a day, that you take over the course of the year, over multiple years, or over a lifetime. So thinking about it as more of an active study than a thing you read one time. So the Daily Stoke might be one that I would start with, or the email's at dailystoake.com. But what I love about reading and rereading

is that you get something new out of it each time. And sometimes when we race through to get to the end of a book, we're just trying to get done with it as opposed to like engage and re-engage with it. But the idea that we need to be constantly reminded of these things and that it's a process. Stoicism isn't this thing you get as a result of an epiphany or having been explained to it, but instead it's a journey that you're on.

And even Marcus Rios, the reason he's writing meditations isn't for us, he would have been mortified that we're talking about him today because it was never meant for publication. What he was doing was trying to speak to himself and remind himself of these ideas over and over and over again. And then someone was a fan of ego's enemy and one of their favorite chapters, actually one of my favorite chapters in ego's enemy is this idea about keeping your own score

card, which can be hard, you know, especially if it was a real estate agent or any kind of business professional, like obviously the external scorecard matters too. But they wanted me to talk a little bit more about the internal scorecard. There's two ways to measure your life based on the external stuff that you've accumulated, the awards that you've won, the money you've earned, what people have said about you, your reputation, right? All of that.

Or it can be based on what you do, the internal stuff. Are you pleased with who you are, what you've done, the work product you've done? Now, it'd be ideal that these two things align, and a lot of times they do. But I can tell you with my own books, Ego is the Enemy should have debuted at number one on the Wall Street Journalist. Opened the paper the day, I know objectively how many copies I sold, I know how many copies the other book sold, and then mysteriously, painfully, obnoxiously it wasn't. That's how life goes, right? If I decide to hand over my definition of success or

satisfaction or pride in my work to an editorial board at a bestseller list or you know the committee that decides who gets into March Madness, or the casting director of this movie or the boss at this company. You've now handed over your definition of success to someone or something else that you don't control. And so for the Stoics, the idea of March Madness is like, look, sanity, happiness is tying your success to your own actions,

not what other people say or do. So that inner scorecard is like, I know that book was the best book that I was capable of writing at that time. And that I said all the things that I wanted to say in that book. And that I didn't cut any corners or take any shortcuts or take anything for granted as far as the marketing

or the building of my platform or any of the work that went into selling it. But after that point, it stopped being in my hands. And to associate my identity or my definition of success or the scorecard with anything past that is a recipe for disappointment at best or madness at worst. So you have to keep a strong sense of who you are, what you're doing, what success looks like to you. I mean, you can't let anyone else get in your head about that.

And then someone was asking me this funny, shortly after this event, I actually put up some signs in the Daily Stoke office related to this. They were asking about like having a sense of urgency. How do you get things done quickly? How do you instill in people a sense of urgency? And I think this is really important. I ended up doing a chapter about this in Discipline is Destiny, which I don't think would have been out yet when I answered this question. I mean, I would agree that it does seem sometimes that people lack a sense of urgency at the same time. It also feels like the world is spinning faster than ever and people are doing more things than ever.

So it's there's also a kind of a franticness. People are too urgent and they don't take the long view often enough, particularly in the market, right? They care about did it go up and down this year when they should be measuring this investment or this potential in decades or more, right? So I do think urgency is important. I think maybe what we're talking about there is hustle, right? If you want something, if you're trying to do something, and then you're lollygagging or not, you know, taking advantage of what's in front of you,

you're gonna be disappointed when you don't get what you want. At the same time, we also need that space for reflection and solitude and the time to think things over. So yeah, I guess from a business perspective, if you don't have that urgency, momentum worry is one way to do it. Also though, I go like look, if it's in my court, I'm gonna tackle it as soon as I can. I always think about my job as a business person, as a writer, whatever. It's like I'm trying to hit the ball back into your court as fast as possible, right?

I don't control what happens when it's in your court, but if it sits in my court two days longer than it should, that's two days that I won't get back that I could have used to move forward. So I just focus on where is my urgency going to speed things up, and then the fact that other people maybe don't respond as quickly or as intensely as I would like them to be,

I sort of leave that to them. And then someone was asking about the inevitability and the unavoidability of suffering and how do we balance the reality of that, but also enjoying life and living fully. Yeah, remember you are immortal, but then also remember to live, right? To be present here in the moment. To me, that's what memento mori does.

It's not sort of dread or worry. It's not making everything pointless. To me, it gives me that urgency, that perspective, that connection to what I'm doing. So again, like I try to balance the books of my books each day. I'm tackling this project and I go look I don't know for certain that I'll live to the end of this, that I'll see it published, but I will know that if someone pulls it up from my computer today, where I stopped, it won't be a mess. I won't have phoned it in. I won't have put things off.

So to me, I'm just trying to remember to do my best here now in this present moment, but then also not to take things too seriously, to go back to the donkey, not to get too wrapped up, too egotistical, too consumed with what I'm doing, because the fragility of life should also sort of humble us and remind us to be here now while we can. And I think that enjoys, you know, fun and beauty

and pleasure and all the things that Las Vegas offers, of course, as well. Thank you guys very much. That's a wrap. 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.

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