The Daily Stoic - Daily Stoic Sundays: Ryan Talks Stoicism with the Cleveland Browns

Episode Date: August 2, 2020

Today’s Daily Stoic Sunday episode features Ryan’s talk to the NFL’s Cleveland Browns from 2019. In it, he gives the team a breakdown of Stoicism, and discusses how they can use its ideas for success on- and off-field.This episode is brought to you by Trends. Trends is the ultimate online community for entrepreneurs and business aficionados who want to know the latest news about business trends and analysis. It features articles from the most knowledgeable people, interviews with movers and shakers, and a private community of like-minded people with whom you can discuss the latest insights from Trends. Visit trends.co/stoic to start your two-week trial for just one dollar. 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. Visit http://gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order 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: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: 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. Is this thing all? Check one, two, one, two. Hey y'all, I'm Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo. I'm just the name of you.

Now I've held so many occupations over the years that my fans lovingly nicknamed me Kiki Keep a Bag Palmer. And trust me, I keep a Bag Love. But if you ask me, I'm just getting started. And there's so much I still want to do. So I decided I want to be a podcast host. I'm proud to introduce you to the Baby Mrs. Kiki Palmer podcast. I'm putting my friends, family, and some of the dopest experts in the hot seat to ask

them the questions that have been burning in my mind. What will former child stars be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms? It's only fans, only bad. I want to know, so I asked my mom about it. These are the questions that keep me up at night, but I'm taking these questions out of my head and I'm bringing these questions out of my head and I'm bringing them to you.

Because on Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, no topic is off limits. Follow Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, whatever you get your podcast. Hey, prime members, you can listen early and app-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Hey everyone, it's Ryan.

You know, it seems like forever ago, but almost exactly a year ago I flew to Cleveland, Ohio, and I had the great honor of giving a talk to the Cleveland Browns. It was not the first time I'd been inside an NFL training camp, but the first time I was addressing a team directly, as you can imagine, it was pretty intimidating. The coaches had heard me when I gave a talk at Alabama a few years earlier, but you know, it was a quite inexperience.

I remember, I asked my friend John Gordon for some advice, and he said, John Gordon's spoken to all sorts of sports teams. He's a great author. You should check out his stuff. But anyways, John said, look, he's like, they're not gonna laugh. It's gonna be a tough audience.

He's like, but if you can give them one thing that they remember, it will be worth it. And he's like, that's why they're bringing you anyway. One thing, which ironically is sort of Seneca's advice, right?

Seneca's point was, just look for one thing every day, that adds up. And so I think the reason coaches and organizations have authors in or motivational speakers or experts come in is that if they give one of these players who they're paying hundreds of millions of dollars to one piece of advice that helps them in one play in one game,

it's worth all the money in the world to them. And so that was my job. And I got up there, I gave sort of five lessons from engine philosophy, five sort of really practical things that I thought these guys could apply in high pressure situations and apply in life as well. And so we're going to play that for you today because I think all of us, although we don't play sports, and in some ways I'm jealous of the sort of win-loss-ness of professional sports, right, that it's like binary. You win or you lose, you know, you win a Super Bowl,

you don't win a Super Bowl, you know, the rest of the world, like, there's no Super Bowl for books, right, and there's no Super Bowl for sales. And there's no NFC East for your profession or my profession. So we live in a slightly more ambiguous world than these athletes, but at the same time, what we share with them is the limitations, right? As I talk to the players about this idea of all you control is how you play.

You control how you play, that's it. And so that's what I wanted to focus on. The Cleveland Browns last year were a team that there was a ton of expectations for it. There was a lot of distractions. There was the temptation of a lot of ego. Ironically, these are things I talked about in my talk. And then the team sort of went on to struggle with that year. And I've seen Baker Mayfield give some interviews.

He's sort of not going to pay attention to social media this year. Something I talked about, he's going to let his game do the talking, something I talked about. But look, when sometimes the teacher and the student don't align and it can take a while for a message to sink in. But it's been awesome. I heard from all sorts of players, you know, since then, we've connected. It's been really cool.

The really cool part of the experience for me was not just talking to the players, but they let me swim in the training facility. That's like sort of one of the weird things I picked up from Robert Green. He's like, whenever you can, try to swim in unique places. You'll always remember it. And so whenever I get it, you know, invited to do a talk for a sports team, I try to think,

you know, I go, hey, can I work out in the gym? Can I swim in the pool? What have you got? So, I've, you know, I've run hills at a, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in Florida for the Pittsburgh Pirates. I've swam in the pool for the Cleveland Browns. Always looking for stuff like that. So, it's definitely an experience for me.

And then the cool part was afterwards. And there's a picture of this on my Instagram, the Cleveland Browns gave a copy of Ego and obstacle to each one of the players and then a momentum, Mori coin. And so that's been a cool experience. And again, I think in the academic world, the idea is this philosophy is this abstract thing. And what gets me excited, I'm always trying to do is apply that to the real world, to these, you know, real people who have huge platforms. So that's what we did. We kicked around these timeless lessons of stoicism. I think lessons that will apply to you.

And that's, that's obviously also what we write about in the Daily Stoke, which I don't know if you've heard, but we are launching, or have launched a premium leather bound edition of the Daily Stoke, which I'm really excited about. It's been four years now since the Daily Stoke came out. So the million copies, it's in 20 languages. I've seen pictures of people's books. They're just beat to hell,

which as an author I take is very high praise. But what we wanted to do is create something sturdier, something a bit more high end, something that could be a gift, something that could sit on someone's shelf, that could be passed from generation to generation. It's awesome, it's premium leather cover. You know, there's an inlay daily stoic for Virtue's logo on the front.

There's guilt pages, there's a, you know, a ribbon for a bookmark, we put some new illustrations in there. I just love it. It looks amazing. We use this high-end Bible manufacturer, actually. And so if the Daily Stoke is sort of a Bible for you, then this might be a cool way to take that study to the next level. And so you can check that out at dailystoke.com slash the leather. And we'll get right into this talk here which I think you will enjoy. All right this guy on Anderson you guys I have that I was fortunate enough to hear him speak

at the owners meetings this year. All right, that was very impressed. All right so we're asking the gun. I didn't realize it till the night he dropped out of the passport. You've never heard of college, right? You've never heard of college. At 21, he started running at a marketing firm for American Apparel. American Apparel. And his written couple books, talks about ego, talks about, you know, standing in the moment.

All the things that we're going to try to do is we move forward. All right, so I appreciate your attention. Brian Halliday. that we're going to try to do is we move forward. So I appreciate your attention. Ryan Halalai. Thank you. Appreciate it. It's good to be here. So my name is Ryan, and I write books about ancient philosophy.

And you're probably thinking who the hell wants to read about that. And that was certainly the question that my publisher asked when I came to them. And in fact, they were not interested in it at all. They gave me what would be probably the equivalent of a minimum contract, although I would say the minimum contracts in publishing are a lot smaller than the minimum contracts

in the NFL. It was basically like what's the least amount of money we can give you to make you go away and not hurt your feelings. But I sense there was something in it and thankfully they were wrong. So when I thought was my friend predicted this book would sell 5,000 copies. Again, they were wrong. They now sold about 2 million copies in 30 languages. Not only did they work, they were not only where the people were wrong, but the books, these seemingly strange books about ancient philosophy ended up working in professional sports, which is

not something that I thought about. All sorts of people you've heard of have read the books, have talked about the books, have become interested in ancient philosophy. It's been pretty awesome. This is a picture of Tom Brady's office. That's the book next to a super bowl trope or a super bowl ball. But the reason I tell this story is twofold. One, you never listen to people who tell you that something's not going to work, because

no one knows what the fuck they're talking about. Right? When people tell you something's not possible, they don't think it's a good idea. They think it's very, very, very unlikely. They're usually talking about themselves and not about them. But the reason I tell the story is not that. It's been wonderful to prove people wrong as many of you in this room have proved people wrong

and beat Neod's. But what I'm interested in is how does a philosophy design 2,500 years ago by the ancient Greeks and Romans? How does this manage to work for someone like George Washington as he's in the darkest days of the American Revolution? How does it work for Navy pilots who were shot down in Vietnam? They spent years being tortured in prison camps. How does philosophy work for someone like Ryan Shazir?

Who many thought would be paralyzed if I didn't ever walk again? And here he is. He may actually run out onto the field at the beginning of this season. So how does something this old, this ancient, this thing that we think is theoretical, we think is for nerds? How does this end up working for real people in the real world? Well, the truth is, philosophy is actually, for precisely that, it's for people who are

trying to get better, who are trying to get better, who are trying to be better. These are timeless, tested principles. I write about this philosophy called stoicism. That's what we're gonna talk a little bit about today. Stoicism is this. Philosophy, as Marcus Aurelius says, it stares you in the face.

No role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you're in right now. This is the most powerful man in the world. He's the emperor of Rome. You've seen the movie Gladiator. He's the guy that Joaquin Phoenix is character kills at the beginning. But in real life, he was one of the greatest kings

in all of history. And yet, he would spend the most evenings reading books about philosophy, studying, how to get better, how to be better at this really hard job that he had. And so what ancient philosophy then is that it's this formula for helping us improve ourselves to get better to realize our full potential. So what I'm going to give you today is five lessons from ancient philosophy that I think

will make you better on the field and better at home and in life. So the two biggest principles I have in Tatuda, my arm, ego is the enemy and the obstacle is the way. But the first lesson we're going to focus on, and I think this is the most important one, is focusing on what's in our control, right? The still to say that our first job in life, the most important job we have as thinkers, is to figure out what's up to us and what's not up to us. What things are in our control and what things are not in our control, right? So they go, look, all the stuff that's happening in the world, everything out there, right? All the decisions, other people, everything that's happening in the world, and then there's this tiny bit of it that we control, right? And so what

the stoics are telling us to do is, look, most people spend most of their time obsessing about everything, everything that's happening in the world, they're anxious about what's happening in the news, they're anxious about what other people are gonna do, what other people are gonna think. But if we can focus on this, the stuff that's in our control, we have a competitive advantage, right? We only have so much energy, and if we focus exclusively

on the things that are in our control, and we let other people waste time thinking about things that are outside of their control, we have an advantage over those people. So it's a resource allocation issue. Let's focus on what's in our control. And so they go, look, something is either up to us, or it's not up to us. And if we can decide this in advance, if we can narrow our focus to what's up to us, we have an advantage, right?

So you guys in this room, you control how you play, right? You don't control whether this guy lets you play. You don't control whether the guy in this room trades you, but you control how you play, right? That's the one thing you control. You control how you play. You don't control what the weather is like when you play, right? You control how you play, but you don't control what these guys decide,

what rulings they make about your play, right? You decide how you play, but you don't control what the refs do. You do control whether you get upset about what the refs do, right? You get upset if you argue with them, you control whether you get a penalty for what, right? You control what you think, what you do. You don't control what other people do. You control how you play. You don't control what these people say, right?

You control your thoughts, your emotions, your decisions, your effort. That's it. Effort is on us, results are not on us. We control what we put in. We don't necessarily control what comes out. And if we can think of this always, it's narrowing the amount of things

that we're gonna expend emotional and mental energy thinking about, right? We spend all our time anxiously wondering what's gonna happen, what decision is coach gonna make? What are people gonna say about us on social media, right? What are the fans gonna think? You know, what's going to make? What are people going to say about a social media? What are the fans going to think? What's going to happen?

We don't control that, but we control what we do. And if we focus on this, we have an advantage. This is Dion Waders, last season, not in good shape. He's coming off an injury. People were making fun of him online. He took a lot of heat for it. He could focus on that. He could focus on how unfair this is,

how mean it is, he could clap back. But instead, he says, no, in the off season, I'm gonna get in the best fucking shape of my life. And that's what he did, right? We don't control what happens, but we always control how we respond. That's the essence of what stoicism is about. Don't control what other people think,

I don't control what other people do, I don't even control the results. But I control how I respond to what happens. So on the one hand, we're going, yeah, there's sort of you're accepting a certain powerlessness. Right, you look at that big circle and you go, so much of this is not up to me. But where we have an incredible amount of power

and where we want to focus all our energy is how we respond to the things that are outside of our control. So you don't control if a rep is unfair, you don't control if you're not getting the looks that you want, you don't control whether other people are getting the attention you think is yours, but you control what you do, you control how you respond, you control whether this makes you better or not, right? And this leads into this critical concept in Stoicism, this idea that we see those obstacles, those things that happen, the things that we didn't want to happen, that we didn't think

should happen, that we're unfair, we control how we respond to them, and we can actually use them to be better. So Marcus really is one of his most famous meditations. He writes this book. We have his journal, the journal, the most powerful man in the world, writing to himself about how to be better. And he says, look, my actions can be impeded, but no one can impede my ability to change my mind, to focus, to adapt, to overcome, right? He says, the impediment to every action advances action, what stands in the way becomes the way.

What he means is, I might get blocked, something might happen, it might not be fair, it might not be fun, it might be the exact opposite of what I want to have happen, but what that presents me is an opportunity, right? The stoics said the obstacles the way, they said that any and every situation, even really shitty bad ones,

we have the opportunity to practice virtue. It's the opportunity for us to be our best self in a different way than we intended, right? So you get injured, you have to miss a game. This is an opportunity for you to focus your energy on being a great teammate, right? You have the ability to always be redirecting and refocusing your energy when one path is blocked towards another path. How can you get better for everything that happens to you? And he grow up the CEO of Intel,

he would say, look, bad people, bad companies, they get wrecked when bad stuff happens. Good companies, they just muddle through, right? They make it through. But great companies, great people, great athletes, they are improved by adversity. There's a story about Thomas Edison. He's America's most famous inventor, super wealthy,

super influential. He's sitting at home with his family and someone rushes in, your factories on fire. He rushes to the scene in there, his life's work up in flames, terrible, right? And he finds his son, his son is standing there, and he's just sort of shocked like, just gonna lose everything. And Edison, he grabs him, and he says, go get your mother and all her friends will never see a fire like this again.

And what he meant is, is not like, hey, I'm excited that my factories burned down, but it's on fire. He can't put it out, right? But he can enjoy the incredible strange and surrealness of this moment. And then what he can do, he can focus on what, on his response. And he would tell a report of the next day, look, I've been through stuff like this before, prevents me from getting bored.

Next day he's back to work. In six weeks, it's back up, it partially back up and running. In six months, it's fully operational. He has one of the best years of his life financially after this fire. And there's this metaphor in stoicism, this concept we call it,

a more faulty, which translates to a love of fate. It means I love everything that happens, right? And I have this coin. We're going to give you each one of the players a coin, this amorphati. I carry it with me everywhere I go. But the idea of a amorphati, it's about embracing things that happen, no matter what it is you embrace it, right?

And Marcus really said, this image of fire, he said, what you throw in front of a fire is fuel for the fire, right? That everything that happens to a great man, to a truly talented wise person, they managed to use in some way. It makes them better in some way. Fuels their greatness, right?

It makes the fire burn brighter and hotter and longer. And that's what you want to think about. Jack Johnson, maybe the greatest boxer who ever lived, he had this, he faced a terrible racism, terrible discrimination. It was a horrible situation, but his greatest virtue, his greatest strength was that it didn't matter what happened in the ring. It didn't matter if people were cheating, it didn't matter if they were yelling horrible tons of them. He had this smile. And it was this smile. You could never, it didn't matter how hard you hit him,

it didn't matter how the fight was going, you could never dislodge this smile from his face. And writers would say at the time that, that it was this smile that broke the back of his opponents, right? They were like, I'm giving this guy everything I have, and I can't get to him, I just can't. And so this was his strength. This idea of like, it doesn't matter what you throw at me. I'm going to throw it right back at you. I'm going to use it. That's

what we're trying to do in stoicism. That's what a philosopher does. Philosopher's not this person who obsesses over books. It's a person who takes the worst shit that life can throw at you and becomes better for it, that throws it right back, that is improved by it, that uses it as an opportunity for excellence, right? And then the next part of stoicism is this idea of focus, of narrowing down what's on our plate,

so we can focus on what really matters, right? I would say the critical problem of our time, of our generation, I'm the same age as most of you, is the inability to focus. There's so much going on in the world. There's so many distractions. And all of you have not just the opportunity to play this game, but you have all the opportunities and luxuries and temptations and distractions that come along with it.

But what you do is incredibly hard. So how can you balance that, right? So Marcus really is, again, same thing. Here he is, emperor of Rome, and all these people they want is time, and they want his attention, and they want him to give them special treatment, and they want him to do this,

and that is toward in all these directions, and he writes to himself in this journal about the importance of concentration, of doing the thing in front of you as if it's the most important thing in your life, wiping everything else away and focusing exclusively on what's in front of you, says, concentrate every minute like a room and like a man

on doing it with precise and genuine seriousness, giving everything you have. So I think the critical question that I would like you guys to leave if you're thinking about is like, what am I going to say no to this year so I can say yes to what matters, right? So I can say yes to this thing, right? Because who here is so talented that you can compete

at the elitist of elite levels while also doing a bunch of other shit that's distracting, that takes away your attention, that you're not elite of the elite at, right? But that's what we do. We have this one thing, and then other people are like, hey, you can make money doing this. Hey, you can get validation doing that.

Hey, I want you to come help me with this. And we want to say, yes, we want to do it all. I'd say one of the hardest things in the world to do is to say no to money, right? Sure, it's super hard not to have any money, but it's hard when people are offering you money or attention or validation to say no to it, to say I'm saying no to that so I can say yes to this. So what can we eliminate from our lives? So we have the mental resources and willpower and capacity to focus on what really matters, right?

Marcus Rios would say, the test we got to go, is this thing really necessary? Is this thing I'm tempted to do that other people are doing that my peers are pressuring me to do? Is this actually necessary? Does it make me better at the thing I am trying to do that I have only a small window to do, right? Is this necessary? Is it making me better? And if it's not, you cut it out, right?

How much more time would you guys have to focus on what you're doing if you didn't check social media? If you've never watched the news, if you could tune out distractions, if you could actually focus, right? I was reading a report. I think that the Arizona Cardinals have given every team in the NFL an enormous advantage, right? Because instead of saying, hey, we're going to focus, we're going to be all in on this. The team is actually scheduled in social media breaks.

Once every hour for 15 minutes, the players get to leave and dig around on their phones, right? So what I would think about it by where you guys is guys is those 15 minutes, that's when you catch up and you pass them, right? That's when you, when they are not practicing, Bill Bradley would say, you are practicing, you are getting better, you are focused, and then when you meet them, you will win, right? When people can't focus, when they can't say no to things that don't matter, This is dragging them down in the places where things do matter, right? And what is social media, but a massive, massive ego boost? Telling us that we're more important, telling us that we're special, you know, or telling us that we've got to fight back, we've got to respond, we've got to do all this crap. But if you can instead

push that away and focus on what's important to you, you will got to respond, we've got to do all this crap. But if you can instead push that away and focus on what's important to you, you will have an edge, right? There's this haunting clip you can watch on the internet of Joan Rivers, the comedian, and they go like, Joan, why do you work so much? You're so accomplished, you're so successful. Why are you saying yes to all these shitty gigs

that don't matter? And she goes, look at this calendar, she brings out a calendar, she's like, see this blank page in this calendar? If this isn't full, right? If I don't have gigs, if I'm not doing press, if I'm not getting attention, she says, that means I'm worthless, right? She says, it means everything I've worked for

is empty and broken and I'm irrelevant. So you can imagine someone whose ego is so fragile, who's so addicted to doing, doing, doing, doing, who has no time to reflect, no time to focus, is not only a miserable person who isn't enjoying the success that they've earned, but is also going to make really bad decisions, right? If you do things, if you say things, if you turn to your phone or if you turn to the platform that you have as a way to make yourself feel good, to try to fill that hole that all of us have, that little inner child that maybe didn't get quite enough, you are going to make bad

decisions. You are going to say yes to things because you think your worth is dependent on it. And meanwhile, the thing that you do better than anyone else in the world is gonna suffer. And there are lots of people who would like to take your place, right? And that leads us into what I think is the biggest enemy that everyone in this room faces, right? Our most dangerous opponent for this team,

to your career, to each and every leader in the world. Look, it's not someone you line up against. It's not the risk of injury. It's not the critics in the world, look, it's not someone you line up against, it's not the risk of injury, it's not the critics in the media, it's not a coach or a GM or even another player, it's you, right? When you look at the great empires of history, when you look at the colossal failures, businesses that went from billions of dollars to zero,

when you look at people who have ruined their careers, ruined their life. Right? It's not some outside force that came and took what they had from them. It's they destroyed themselves, right? And this goes back to all Greek poetry and plays, right? That hubris, right? That tears us down. That makes us overreach. That makes us take our eye up the ball. That's what ego is, right? Our ego is the primary enemy. And look, this goes back a long time. It's in the Bible, right? Pride, Pride go with before the fall.

And then we even have this in ancient Greek poetry, right? The first thing which the gods bestow on those they want to destroy is Pride. Pride is what tears us down. When we think we're better than other people, and we think we're invincible, and we think the rules don't apply to us, this is when we start to get in trouble. This is when we make mistakes. And so it's easy to see the ego and other people, right? We know Steve Jobs ego got him fired from Apple the first time, Kanye West's, he goes always

getting him into trouble. Six, nine, you know,, he's gonna spend the rest of his life in prison. Kind of idiot joins a gang after you become a successful rapper. But that's what ego is, right? That's trying to impress people that don't actually matter. This is the guy that created Fire Fest, right? That idea, you can't just throw a concert on an island if you've never thrown a concert before in your life

and you've not rented an island to have the concert on. But this is what never thrown a concert before in your life and you've not rented an island to have the concert on. But this is what Ego does. It gets us in trouble. This is the founder of Theranos billionaire, net worth now of zero, right? Because she liked the marketing and the hype of what she was doing. But another word for faking it to you make it is fraud. And she's going to spend time in jail as well.

So it's easy to think about other people's ego, and you can spot that pretty easy, and we know when people's ego is holding them back. But where does your ego hold you back? That's what I want you to think about, right? What is ego preventing you from learning or doing? Where are you making decisions out of ego and how is that causing problems for you? A pectetus, one of the stoic philosophers philosophers I think he encapsulates where it egos, really holds us back.

It says, it's impossible for you to learn that which you think you already know. If you think you're as good as you can be, you're right, because you can't get any better, right? If you think you know everything, you're right because nobody can teach you anything. And so what we actually find is that the truly great in sports, in business,

in life, in literature, what they're actually defined by is this incredible humility, this hunger to learn. They're perpetual students of their craft, right? Ralph Waldo Emerson, every person that you meet is better than you in something, and that's what you want to focus on. There's a great physicist, and he was saying, look, the more I learned about physics, the more I found out that I didn't know. What he said, the said, as your island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of ignorance, right? As you get better, as you're in this league, a longer amount of time, as you go from playing to coaching or playing to announcing or playing to business, what you're constantly going to be exposed to

is all the things that you didn't even know, you didn't know, right? And so if you're the kind of person who reacts negatively to that, like if you don't know something, you stick your head in the sand, you get defensive, you get turned off, you're not gonna get any better. But if you're the kind of person that likes being a student

that's perpetually obsessed with learning and getting better and sees it is actually confident enough to say, I don't know, right? I don't know, tell me about it, right? I find myself all the time people ask me a question about something because I don't wanna admit, I don't know about it, I pretend that I know, and then they skip over teaching me about that thing, right? And so if you think you know everything,

you don't get any better, and this is where ego tears us apart. Ego also prevents us from collaborating effectively with other people. Pat Riley talks about the disease of me, how it tears teams apart, and Cleveland, the city of Cleveland is a great example of this, right? How many championships did LeBron James and Kyrie Irving leave on the table because they couldn't get along, right? Shack and Kobe, it's the same thing. Michael Jordan, you know,

incapable of getting along with his teammates because he couldn't, these great people can't understand that not everyone is wired just like them. They can't understand their motivations. They can't understand the different people are needing and wanting different things they live in a world other than your own bubble, right? Kyry Irving's such a sad example of this, right? He actually didn't want LeBron to come back to Cleveland.

Wrap your head around that. The best player, maybe in the history of your game, wants to come home and bring a championship to your city. And he says, no, but now I'm not gonna be the number one guy on the team anymore. Kind of bullshit is that, right? And the same thing ends up happening to him when he goes to Boston and look,

the same thing's gonna happen to him in Brooklyn if you can't figure out how to keep this ego in check. But LeBron's not blameless in this either, right? It doesn't occur to LeBron that this had been Kyrie's team and that Kyrie wasn't, hadn't made as much money as him and that Kyrie wasn't as famous as him and that Kyrie was, you know, not getting the same special treatment as LeBron. It totally catches LeBron by surprise when Kairi demands to be traded, right? And this is ego on both sides. It's teammates living so much in their own bubble,

so much in their own head, so ignorant of what other people are going through, what other people want in need, that they leave wins on the table. So the disease of me, it's not just costly and it makes us miserable. It does make us miserable, but it tears teams apart. And if you think back, even again, to the Bible, the story of David and Goliath is ultimately a story of ego versus confidence.

Goliath thinks he's invincible. No one can beat me. Look how big I am. No one's beat me. Look how big I am. No one's beaten me before. Obviously, I'm unbeatable. David hears the challenge from Goliath, and he says, I think I can do that, but I'm small. I don't have the advantages that Goliath has, and this is why he fishes a few stones from the river, and he attacks Goliath and a surprise, he hits them with a stone with his sling, and then this is a famous painting of the story.

Cuts off Goliath's head with his own sword, but engraved here on the hill is the acronym HOCS, which stands for Humility Kills Pride. This is the timeless cycle in kills pride, right? This is what, this is the timeless cycle in prize fighting, right? The underdog beats the overconfident champion, becomes the champion, becomes overconfident, becomes egotistical, stops training,

stops getting better, and then boom, they're beaten by a younger version of themselves, right? That's the cycle, that's what ego does. So confidence in ego is the same thing. Confidence is an understanding of our strength, but also an awareness of where we're weak, of where we need to get better. Ego is this sort of delusional sense that we have no weaknesses and we have unlimited strengths. And so we see in philosophy, there's no ancient philosophical school or religion that says, ego's great.

We need more ego. Ego is the key to happiness, right? They all say the opposite for a reason. Hey, it's Ryan. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Hey, everyone. It's Ryan. As you know, I've got two young kids.

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over 50 bucks, that's gomacro.com, use promo code still it. And then that leads us into the last lesson I wanted to talk with you guys about. This is the idea of an inner scorecard, right? What does, how do you measure your success? How do you actually determine what success is for you, right? Is it winning? Is it making lots of money? Was it being the best version of yourself, right? Is it winning? Is it making lots of money?

Or is it being the best version of yourself, right? Warren Buffett. Super rich, super successful by any external scorecard, right? Any external measure. He's one of the best investors and financiers to ever live. And yet, he's saying that it's more important to live by an inner scorecard than an outer scorecard.

But this is a picture of Nick Saven, exactly where raising a national championship trophy. How is he unhappy in this moment, right? When I spoke to Alabama a couple years ago, he and I talked about this. He was saying that the reason he can sometimes look unhappy when they're up by 45 points or when they just want a championship is that he's holding himself and the team to a higher standard than just winning, right? John Wooden said the same thing. He's like, look, what matters is, did we do in a game what we set out to do in practice,

whether we win or lose is secondary to that. So if you lose, but you did everything right, right? That's okay. But if you win on a fluke or because the other team blew it and you did everything wrong, that you don't get to give yourself credit for that success. And this is what this idea of an inner scorecard, versus an outer scorecard.

One of the ways you keep ego from creeping in is that you hold yourself to a higher standard than winning or losing, right? You guys are potentially favored to win your division this year. But if you win your division and y'all hate each other at the end of it, if you did it based on a couple lucky breaks or worse, right? Or you hate the game, even though you win lots of them, that's not winning, right? Because by the inner scorecard, by the sense of the standards to which you hold yourself,

you didn't actually get there. So you hold yourself to a higher standard than just what other people think. Because other people don't know what you're trying to do. So another football example, this is Tom Brady's draft card from 2,099 picked, six round, strangely in better shape now than he was going into the league.

But you'd think that the Patriots would be pretty pumped about taking Tom Brady in the six round, right? Maybe the best draft pick in the history of sports, right? To get such a talented player so low in the draft, right? You think that'd be pretty incredible. You think they'd be congratulating themselves. You think they'd be pumped. But actually, they're not.

What they actually thought about was, hey, who did we take in the fifth round? And they took this guy, Dave Stochelski, who actually doesn't even make it out of training camp this year or that year, right? So they thought this guy was worth a whole round of picks more than Tom Brady. So what the Patriots do as an organization, instead of patting themselves on the back for this success,

for proving themselves to be smarter and better than any other team, they focus on how easily it could have gone wrong. They hold themselves to a higher standard. They go, hey, everyone thinks we're geniuses for drafting Tom Brady. But in fact, our intelligence was totally wrong. We thought this guy was better, right? How can we get better?

And actually, the director of personnel for the Patriots for many years keeps a picture of Stochelski on his desk as a reminder to keep him humble, right? To keep him hungry and say, I don't want to make that mistake again. I keep, I hold myself to a higher standard than what the media is going to hold me to, right? Because the same media that says you suck is also the media that's so, so ready to give you credit

for things that you didn't actually have anything to do with. And so that's what this idea of the inner sport card is. Marcus really should say our job is to accept success without arrogance and to let it go within difference, right? He would say, look, we don't control what other people think or do, but we always control whether we do the right thing, whether we hold ourselves to the right standard.

And so this idea, it's not just about keeping pushing ego down, right? Although that's part of it. The reason you want to have this inner scorecard, and not an external scorecard, is because so many people attach their self-worth to success, to winning. But as you all know, winning is not totally in your control. It depends on the other people in this room. It depends on the weather. It depends on calls from refs.

It depends on so many things that are outside your control. So there are going to be times when life just rips your guts out. When you just get totally screwed, when you get every bad break, you can possibly think of. And so the reason you have this inner score card, the reason you hold yourself to a higher standard, is so you can hold your head up even when you do lose, even when things go wrong.

Because you go, I don't measure myself by that. I measure myself by the effort that I put in, the attitude that I have, the standards that I hold myself. I know what success looks like, not the score, right? And so life is constantly been giving us these opportunities. It's constantly putting us in trouble, it's constantly putting us through crises.

It's constantly kicking our ass. And we could see it that way, we could see the world is unfair, we could see it as brutal, we could see it as exhausting, sometimes even depressing, or we can see it as brutal, we can see it as exhausting, sometimes even depressing, or we can say, actually, these are opportunities for excellence, right?

These are opportunities for me to live up to what I believe and to be the best version of myself. And that's what philosophy is there to help us do, right? What these opportunities are doing is giving us a chance to lead by example, right? You can take the easy way, right, or you can take the hard way. You can hold yourself to the external scorecard. You can hold yourself to the internal scorecard.

And if you can hold yourself to this internal scorecard, if you can have a higher standard than anyone else, it also helps you ride out when life does kick your ass when things do suck. And one of my favorite moments from the season last year is this, this is Drew Breeze after the NFC championship game. You might remember that game, right? The Saints, a bit of a Saints fan,

a robbed of a chance to go to the Super Bowl, right? By a blown call. And you could imagine that's pretty devastating for someone like Drew Breeze, right? As the season of his life, it's getting older. It doesn't know how many more of these he's going to have. And there's something totally outside of his control that prives him of a moment that he felt like he earned.

And yet, here he is after the game. You know what happens after a game, right? Players come out onto the field. Their families are there and meet people maybe you invited to the game, you play around, you decompress. Or maybe if it's one of those losses, you just soak in the locker room, right? You're so mad, you're so angry. But here we see Drew Breeze, and he's on one knee. You can think about what's probably going through

his mind at this moment, how he's feeling, how devastated he would be, how mad he would be, and yet there he is, playing football on the field with his kids. He's pushed it out of his mind, and he's on one knee time his son's shoe, right? He's pushed it away. He's come back to the present moment, and I can also imagine running through his head is how he's gonna come back even better next season for this, right?

He's gonna be improved by it. But in the moment, it's an opportunity to show what a good dad is like. It's an opportunity to be improved by it. But in the moment, it's an opportunity to show what a good dad is like. It's an opportunity to be a dad, not to take it out on his kid, not to neglect his kid because he's going through something, right? And so to me, this is actually what philosophy is about. It's there to prepare us for these sort of devastating

life-altering moments when what we think has happened is so unfair, when it's the opposite of what we think is happened is so unfair when it's the exact opposite of what we want. It's an opportunity to lead by examples of live up to the principles to the things we know are true that we admire if other people do, but it's a chance for us to do those things. And I think the final reason why we've got to do this is something I spend a considerable amount of time thinking about in my life and I think if you guys could leave with it and you could apply it to your life, not only would you

be better, you'd be nicer, you'd be more present, you'd be happier. It's something I think about. I live outside Austin, Texas. I have a little farm, and in the morning, my son and I would go for a walk. We watch the sun come up. We just sort of sit there and we experience the moment. And I spend a little time as I'm doing this walk, I spend a little time thinking about the fact

that I'm a mortal being, right, that I'm going to die. That life is finite, that it could end at any moment. And I actually keep another coin in my pocket, it's his memento, Mori. And it has the three eternal truths of life, right? An hourglass of school, and a flower, life, time truths of life, right? An hourglass of school and a flower, life, time and death, right? We will all die.

Everyone who was born was born with a terminal illness. There has not been a single person born who has not eventually died, right? We are all mortal. Life is very fleeting. And the line from Marcus Aurelis, you would write to himself, he said, you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say can think, right? This could be

the last leading you sit in in your life. Tomorrow could be the last practice of your life. It could be a last game of your life, last game of your career. It could be the last time you walked your car, the last time you talked to your girlfriend or your wife, the last time you walked your car, the last time you talked to your girlfriend or your wife, the last time you tuck your kids into bed, right? Life is very fleeting and like that. Even if you, on average, we're supposed to live till we're 75, right? 78, something like that. That doesn't prevent you from being hit by a bus. Doesn't prevent you from being killed by a drunk driver, right?

Doesn't prevent you from getting a life-changing diagnosis and you suddenly find out. You've got just a few months to live. Life is very finite. So how are you going to behave now as that steers you in the face? How are you going to take advantage? Truly live be the best person you can in that moment, right?

I gave a talk in Philadelphia a couple years ago and I went for this run before my talk. It's where I like to think about things and as I went through this run, I stopped in this cemetery. It was this beautiful old cemetery. And I stopped and I saw this tombstone. You can't read it. It's pretty worn down. But it's a woman she died in 1805, right, at age 55. So before her time, a very long time ago,

and the verse she chose to have on her tombstone says, versus on tombstone are, but I'd only spent the living character is the monument, right? Who cares what legacy you leave, what matters is what you do while you're alive, right? It doesn't matter how much money you accumulate, how famous you get, right?

It doesn't matter how many Super Bowl trophies you win, how many Pro Bowl appearances you rack up. What matters is what kind of person you actually are, is your character, is the person you were in those moments when you're tested, when life is showing you just how little you control, is the response that you have, is the character that you show, is that the monument that have, is the character that you show, is that the monument that you're leaving behind? If I could leave you with one thought, it would be that, right? The living character is the monument.

So that's the idea, what there's no situation, so bad that there's not some opportunity for improvement, for advancement, for rendering some good, right? The obstacle is always the way. And there is no situation improved by the introduction of ego, right? You guys sit in rooms, you're never like, you know what would really make this room better

if we had some more egos jostling around. No, we want less ego. Ego is always the enemy. Ego is always preventing us from being better. Ego is the enemy of the obstacle is the way. Memento Mori and Morpati, what can you say no to this year so you can say yes to the things that really matter? That's what I want to leave you with.

Thank you guys. These are the books, I really appreciate it. I've got time for questions if you want. Okay, so that painting, that's a Carvachio painting, one of the great European painters. You painted David and Goliath, right? It's the moment that David has killed the giant Goliath. The message of that painting engraved on the sword, it's his H-O-C-S, and what that stands for in Latin, is humility kills pride.

David's awareness of his own weaknesses and his own strength matched against Goliath's delusional sense of his own invincibility is what allows the little guy to destroy the big guy, right? And that's the lesson I think we all have to remember. So when we think we can't be beaten, when we think we don't have weaknesses, when we don't think there's something to improve in our game, our personality, or our mental approach,

that's precisely what our opponents are looking for and they're gonna find it, and that's where they're gonna be. If you like the podcast that we do here and you want to get it via email every morning, you can sign up at dailystoic.com slash email. 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 the Daily Stoic early and add free on Amazon music, download the Amazon music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.

Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday's parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert-expert. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there.

We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad free on the Amazon music or Wondery app.

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