The Daily Stoic - Daily Stoic Sundays: Life Comes at You Fast. So You Better Be Ready.

Episode Date: May 10, 2020

In today’s episode, Ryan reads his latest article about the unpredictability of life, and how we should always be prepared for the worst and the best that it has to offer us.Read the original article here: https://geni.us/rLEd0This 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.***If you enjoyed today’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/dailystoicSee 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 Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. 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 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 stoic 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. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wendery'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.

Life comes at you fast. Life comes at you fast. So you better be ready. In 1880, Theodore Roosevelt wrote to his brother, my happiness is so great that it makes me almost afraid. In October of that year, life got even better as he wrote in his diary the night of his wedding to Alice Hathaway Lee, our intense happiness is too sacred to be written about. He would consider it to be one of the best years of his life. He got married, wrote a book, attended law school, and won his first election for public office.

The street continued. In 1883, he wrote, I can imagine nothing more happy in life than an evening spent in the cozy little sitting room before a bright fire of soft coal, my books all around me and playing backgammon with my own danty wife. And that's how he and Alice spent that cold winter as it crawled into the new year. He wrote in late January that he felt he was fully coming into his own. I feel now as though I have the reins in my hand,

he said, and on February 12th, 1884, his first daughter was born. Two days later, his wife would be dead of brights disease, now known as kidney failure. His mother had died only hours earlier in the same house of typhoid fever. Roosevelt marked that day in his diary with a large X. Next to it, he wrote, the light has gone out of my life. As they say, things come at you fast. Have the last few weeks not been an example of that. In December, the Dow was at 28,000. Things were good enough that people were complaining about the war on Christmas and debating the skin color of Santa Claus. In January, the Dow was at 29,000 and people were outraged about the recent Oscar nominations. In February, it reached a staggering 29,568 and Delta Airlines' stock fell

25% in a week because people argued over a message from the CEO about passengers reclining their seats. Even in early March, there were news stories about Wendy's entering the breakfast war and a free stock trading app outage that caused people to miss a big market rally. And that was just in the news. Think about what you busied yourself with at home during that same period.

Maybe you and your wife were looking at plans to remodel your kitchen. Maybe you were finally going to pull that trigger on a Tesla Model S for yourself, the $150,000 one with the ludicrous speed package. Maybe you were fuming that Amazon took an extra day to deliver a package. Maybe you were frustrated that your kid's room was a mess. And now, how quaint and stupid does all that seem? Depending on the day you looked years of market gains have been taken back, 47 million people

are projected to be added to the unemployment roles. The death count of what was dismissed as a mere respiratory flu or a hoax is now inching towards 170,000, and there are millions of cases confirmed worldwide. There have been runs on supplies, hospitals, and certain countries are maxing out on ventilators. The global economy has essentially ground to a halt. Life comes at as fast, doesn't it? It can change in an instant.

Everything you built, everyone you hold dear can be taken from you for absolutely no reason. Just as easily you can be taken from them. And this is why the Stoics said we need to be prepared constantly for the twists and turns of fortune. It's why Seneca said that nothing happens to the wise man contrary to his expectation because the wise man has considered every possibility

even the cruel and heartbreaking ones. And yet even Seneca was blindsided by a health scare in his early 20s that forced him to spend nearly a decade and heartbreaking ones. And yet, even Senaqa was blindsided by a health scare in his early 20s that forced him to spend nearly a decade in Egypt to recover. He lost his father less than a year before he lost his firstborn son. And 20 days after burying his son,

he was exiled by the emperor. He lived through the destruction of one city by a fire and another by an earthquake before being exiled two more times. One needs only to read his letters and essays written on a rock off the coast of Italy to get a sense that even a philosopher can get knocked on their ass and feel sorry for themselves from time to time. What do we do? Well, first, knowing that life comes at us fast, we should always be prepared. Seneca wrote that the fighter who has seen his own blood, who has felt his teeth rattle beneath his opponent's fist, who has been downed in body but not in spirit,

only they can go into the ring confident of their chances of winning. They know that they can take getting bloodied and bruised. They know what the darkness before the proverbial dawn feels like. They have a true and accurate sense for the rhythms of a fight and what winning requires. That sense only comes from getting knocked around. That sense is only possible because of their training in his own life. Seneca bloodied and bruised himself through a practice called premeditatio

malorum, a premeditation of evils rehearsing his plan. Say to take a trip, you would go over the things that could go wrong to prevent that trip from happening. A storm could spring up, the captain could fall ill, the ship could be attacked by pirates, he could be banished to the island of Corsica the morning of the trip. By doing what he called premeditasha,

Moulorm Seneca was always prepared for disruption and always working that disruption into his plans. He was fitted for defeat or victory. He stepped into the ring confident that he could take any blow. Nothing happened contrary to his expectations. Second, we should always be careful not to tempt fate. 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 SPF 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. In 2016, General Michael Flynn stood on the stage in the Republican National Convention and led some 20,000 people in an impromptu chant of lock her up, lock her up about his enemy, Hillary Clinton. And when Trump won, he was swept into office in a whirlwind of success and power. But then just 24 hours into his day, Flynn was fired for lying to the Vice President about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador to the United States. He would

admit this lie and he would be brought up on charges and convicted of lying to the FBI. Life comes at us fast, but that doesn't mean we should be stupid and we shouldn't be arrogant. Third, we have to hang on. Remember that in the depths of both of Seneca's darkest moments, he was unexpectedly saved. From exile, he was suddenly recalled to be the Emperor's tutor. In the words of the historian Richard M. Gumier, fortune whom Seneca, as a stoic often ridicules, came to his rescue. But as Churchill, as always, put it better, sometimes when fortune scales most spipely, she is preparing her most dazzling gifts. Life is like this. It gives us bad breaks, heartbreakingly bad breaks, and it also gives us incredible lucky breaks.

Sometimes the ball that should have gone in bounces out. Sometimes the ball that had no business going in surprises both Lee athlete and the crowd when eventually after several bounces somehow it manages to pass through the net. When we are going through a bad break, we should never forget fortune's power to redeem us. When we're walking through the roses, we should never forget how easily the thorns can tear us apart, how quickly we can become humbled. Sometimes life goes your way, sometimes it doesn't. And that is what Theodore Roosevelt learned too, despite what he wrote in his diary that day in 1884, the light did not completely go out of his life. Sure, it flickered. It looked like the flame

had been cruelly extinguished. But with time and incredible energy and force of will, he came back from those tragedies. He became a great father, a great husband, and a great leader. He came back and the world was better for it. He was better for it. Life comes at us fast today. Tomorrow, when you least expect it, so be ready, be strong, and don't let your life be snuffed out. 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 podcasts, 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.